Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland

by Frank Tayell

  Day 107, Longshanks Manor, Wiltshire.

  14:00, 27th June.

  I was woken by the sound of an elephant. I've always liked elephants, liked how they seem completely indifferent to the existence of us humans. Perhaps it was a hippo. Or a rhino. My knowledge of animals, and the noises they make, comes more from animated films than nature documentaries. It sounded big, though, and it's pleasing to know that at least some other animals have survived thus far.

  It was refreshing, this morning, being able to wake up and do nothing. A reminder of those weekends, few and far between in recent years, when I had nothing to get up for. I spent an hour or so finding some new clothes, since there's no water to spare to wash my old ones.

  There's enough tinned and dried food for about ten weeks for the two of us, and I'm not talking about crates of tinned peaches either. Breakfast this morning was kumquats in grape juice. If I had toast I could spread some “By Royal Appointment” lychee and crab-apple marmalade on it. But I don't have toast. Spooning it out of the jar brought back some once happy memories, now bitter-sweet with all I've seen.

  Then I wandered the halls, but the more time I spend here, the more the memories of happy times come back, and with them the realisation that everyone in those memories is now probably dead. Perhaps I do just want to get things over with, but by mid-morning I had had enough.

  “I think we should leave,” I said. It had taken me an hour to find her, lying on the floor of one of the attic bedrooms, staring at the sky through the high, dirt encrusted window.

  “Yes. I was thinking that too,” Kim replied, sitting up. I'd been expecting a fight. I don't know why, perhaps I’m finding it hard to adjust to another person in my life. “Tomorrow morning. We'll need to pack first.”

  Bags were easy enough to find. There were a stack of them in the room with all the loot. I took another moment to look at that pile of jewellery, ornaments, trophies and the electronic gadgetry that would never work again. Other than the bags there was little of any practical value, no first aid kits, no fire extinguishers, no toilet paper. Sanders and Cannock had done nothing more than build up a dragon's horde of the shiny and worthless.

  Next came weapons. I kept my hatchet and chisel at my belt, with the pistol in one of the many pockets of a thigh length jacket I'd found hanging in the Duke's bedroom. A set of carry-on luggage provided the strap for the pike. The contrast of nylon and plastic with the steel and wood was pleasingly incongruous.

  Kim found an axe that she liked the heft of, hanging in the same room I'd found the pike. I don't know how a historian would describe it, but I would call it a killing axe. It has a three foot long shaft, with a single broad tapered blade and a flattened hammer head criss-crossed with grooves, surely designed for the crushing of armoured limbs and skulls. It's too sharp to chop wood, too heavy to hammer nails. It is no workman's tool.

  Added to the weight of food, the hard drive, can openers, rope, saucepan, matches and kindling, the last of the lemonade, and we were nearly overloaded. Kim thought my suggestion of taking a wok from the kitchen was proof I'd been on my own too long. Those were her actual words. I tried to explain how useful they were as portable fire pits. She just gave me a look. In the end, I had to concede that with everything else it was far too heavy.

  Then we turned to the ammunition. Kim had been right. Weight wasn’t so much of an issue as where to put it all. The bags were unpacked and sorted once more, with anything that could possibly be found elsewhere being discarded as we re-packed out gear for the first of many times.

  18:00, 27th June.

  A light drizzle has begun to fall. It would be refreshing if we could walk outside. Water in the lake, water falling from the sky, water, water everywhere, but not a drop we can touch.

  We've reached a compromise on the ammo and the food we can't carry. It's now hidden in a cupboard in the main kitchen. Hidden is probably an exaggeration. It's stacked neatly behind an ice-cream maker, a waffle iron and what is either a deformed whisk or the world's largest milk frother. They're all still in their boxes and have the look of unwanted gifts from people seen too frequently for them to be thrown away. Any half decent looter would find our stash.

  I want to leave a note, an apology and explanation in case anyone ever comes back here. I feel I owe them that, but Kim is adamantly against it. I think this is more to do with her experiences here than it is to do with in effectively handing these supplies over to whoever may come here next.

  Once we'd finished packing, we retreated to that small bedroom to eat tinned fruit by the unlit fire.

  “Why?” Kim asked.

  “Why what?”

  “All of this. Everything. The zombies, the virus or vaccine or whatever it was...” she hesitated “I mean, you saw a video of the Foreign Secretary in New York. What's his name? Quigley?”

  “Sir Michael Quigley. Former Defence Minister, Shadow Minister for Health before that. He's the one who took over after the Prime Minister disappeared during those first couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah, I wondered why he stopped appearing on the TV.”

  “I thought he'd had a break down, but now?” I shrugged. “ I don't know. Quigley took over, he always wanted the top job. He was a career politician. I don't mean he went into politics straight out of university, I mean the other kind. The kind who mapped out their path to Number 10 whilst they were still at school. He did eight years in the Army before being invalided out, then spent just long enough in what was euphemistically called logistics to afford the sizeable donation needed to buy himself a safe seat and a cabinet job for life.”

  “Yeah, he was the one the press always described as dedicated,” Kim said. “Except they never say to who, or what, he'd dedicated himself to. I remember him. Wasn't he a friend of Masterton's?

  “Lord Masterton, yes. They were old Cabinet colleagues.”

  “And she's the father of Jen. The one you worked for?”

  “Worked with. I grew up with her. Sort of. During the holidays at least. Term time I spent at boarding school. I think it was Lord Masterton who paid for that, though I never asked, and could never work out why.”

  “Right. But you knew these people, you worked for them?”

  “With them, but I don’t think Lord Masterton had anything to do with this. He's been retired for years.”

  “Yeah, well you know what they say about retired politicians. So Quigley, then. And the PM and the rest of the Cabinet and whoever else that knew. The Americans, I suppose, since it was in New York. What were they doing? Was this an accident or a mistake or some kind of weapon gone wrong?”

  “I really don't know.”

  “But you have an idea. You can make an educated guess. You've seen the footage, you know these people.”

  I thought for a moment, but I didn't need to think for long, because in truth I had been thinking about little else since I first saw that video. “It's a puzzle. I don't mean it's puzzling, I mean that there are all these little pieces that somehow are connected and whilst I've got some of them, I’m missing others. I've thought if I put them together I might get a sense of the whole, but no matter how many different ways I arrange them I can't see beyond the outline.” I shook my head and tried to gather my thoughts, as Kim just sat there, patiently waiting.

  “Yes, it started in New York. That was the beginning,” I said, carefully. “Those initial reports, the train stations, the freeways, that shopping mall, they all add up to it starting somewhere in the city. That video from the hospital ties it all together. I don’t think those officials who were there to witness it knew what was going to happen. If they did, there's no way you'd get representatives of China, Britain, the US and whoever the others were, within a thousand miles of that room.”

  “Why New York, then? Why not some out of the way lab in the middle of the desert or somewhere?”

  “Easy. You can get pretty much any cabinet minister of any government in the world there on the pretext they're going to the UN. No
one asks. No one questions it. It's how a lot of peace talks and back room deals get done. Got done. That's why it wasn't in the UK.”

  “But it was created here.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It has something to do with the super-vaccine and yes, that has to be connected to the virus, but why and how and whether it was deliberate? I don't know.” She opened her mouth to speak, but I went on before she could say anything. “I could guess, sure, come up with a plausible hypothesis, but it'd still be just a guess.”

  “It was the planes,” she said, after a while. “Diplomats on planes. That's how it spread so quickly.”

  “Probably. Almost certainly,” I said. “There were procedures in place, after the whole bird flu thing, to quarantine planes, and even entire airports. No one talked about them, but they were there. Didn't matter how important you were, didn't matter if it was a private jet and you were the principal donor to your country's ruling party, you'd get stuck in a plastic tent just like the guy travelling in coach. Except if you were a politician on a diplomatic flight. No one can ground that plane, not even in China if the passenger's on the Central Committee.”

  Silence settled between us once more.

  “So what's your plan?” she asked, eventually.

  “I told you,” I said, “to go to the facility and make sure that everything there is destroyed.”

  “Yes, but how are you going to do that?”

  “I don't know.” I admitted

  “And what'll you do if the place is still occupied?” She asked. “I mean, hasn't it occurred to you that of all the places in the world, that one is most likely to be either a smoking hole in the ground or surrounded by soldiers?”

  “Yes,” I said, and it had. “That doesn't matter. I've got to at least try. There's just so much I don't know. Someone, and I don't really know who and I certainly don't understand why, but for some reason they dragged me into their grand scheme. I want to know why.”

  “So this is just about you then, not about those vials in that vault, or the future, or making the world a safer place.” She stood up. “You just want to know why someone had to go and mess up Bartholomew Wright's little life.”

  “No. Of course not, it's more than that.” I said, though the words didn't sound sincere.

  “An evacuation could have worked.” She said, seemingly changing the subject.

  “What? Well, perhaps if...”

  “No. It could. It was worth trying, and you must have thought so, otherwise you wouldn't have suggested it.”

  “I was different back then.”

  “Perhaps.” she echoed mockingly, “but it could have worked. And it was worth trying. But it failed. It was sabotaged and that had nothing to do with you. It's over. Your part is done. You don't need to go chasing after pieces of the past because they don't matter. None of it does, not any more.”

  “The past is all I have.” I looked at her then, into those dark seemingly bottomless eyes. “It's all we have, you, me and whoever else might have survived. We're never going to build a new Camelot. There's never going to be that city upon a hill. All those people, those that became the undead, those who were murdered, and those who starved or froze or just gave up. Billions of people, an entire race, are dead. We need to know what happened, and then someone has to make sure it can't happen again. It's all there is now, at least for me. Ever since I saw the bodies at the Muster Point, I understood that there's no one else who can do it, no one, just me.”

  Kim walked over to the window.

  “Except,” she said, “you could have left yesterday. No, If you really believed that, you would never have come here. You would have crossed the motorway.”

  Day 108, Salisbury Plain.

  19:00 28th June.

  This morning, I was woken again by that bizarre trumpeting bellow, more suited to the savannah than the English countryside. Though in many ways I wish I had never gone to Longshanks Manor, rescuing Kim notwithstanding, I will miss that sound.

  In the end we did leave a note. It made no mention of Kim, nor of the stash in the kitchen. Instead, we included a simple explanation of what Sanders and Cannock had done to the previous inhabitants and what we in turn had done to them. Perhaps someone will come along and find the food and my bike, and perhaps it will help them to survive. I hope so.

  We gathered our gear and quadruple wrapped everything in plastic and cling film. I ran a dry test, so to speak, in a bucket filled with the undrunk lake water, just to make sure the hard drive would be fine. Then we checked and rechecked that we weren't leaving anything behind, nor taking anything extraneous with us. Then we escaped.

  It was almost as simple as that. We'd taken two of the large oak doors off their hinges and carried them down to the kitchens. Then we placed them on top of two serving trolleys that had that old fashioned sturdiness of an age when dinner was served with a dozen courses for two dozen guests.

  Kim had spent half an hour with the rifle thinning out the undead around the kitchen-side of the house. The trick, we've learnt, is not to shoot the zombies immediately in our path, as the sound of the body hitting the ground will attract the others. Instead, by taking out half a dozen to the left and the right of the door we created a zombie-free corridor down to the lake.

  So all we had to do was open the doors and, pushing the trolleys in front of us, run straight down the path, onto the jetty and let momentum carry us out and into the water. That was easy. A lot easier than trying to clamber onto our improvised rafts once we were in the water.

  They floated well enough, but every time I tried to pull myself up and onto it, the door would just sink and twist round. It was the weight of the brace, I think. In the end, I held on as best I could. Using the door like a float, I half swam, half drowned my way across the lake. Kim had it easier, and I swear she was grinning when she pulled me out of the muddy shallows. Then we just hurried away.

  It took us all day to find two bikes. The first we found at lunchtime but didn't find the second until about an hour ago. We would have been quicker, but I wanted to check the cars. Brazely Abbey is about forty miles directly east, across Salisbury Plain. Without knowing where we'd shelter for the night, that's an impossible distance on foot. By bike, however, it's two days at most, perhaps one, and possibly far less than that. By car, with all the detours due to the blocked roads, it wouldn't be much quicker, that wasn't why I wanted a car. I’m starting to think that the only way across the motorway is at speed, preferably shielded on all sides by carbon fibre and steel. No, that's not really it. That's an explanation, but since there was no way we could carry the extra weight of fuel, it doesn't explain why I felt compelled to check vehicles that were little more than scrap metal.

  “Where will you go after?” Kim asked, when I was running some wire into the sixth fuel tank of the day. Of those we'd tried, only one had had any fuel. Not much, but even if it had, there was no way we'd be able to drive it anywhere. It had a flat battery an even flatter tyre, and scrapes and dents along the sides suggested it had been driven there with no consideration for anything but speed.

  “After?”

  “After you've been to the facility and done your saving the world bit. What then?”

  “Back to the Abbey, I suppose,” I said. “I think with some work it could hold up through the winter. It'll be hard with just the two of us, but perhaps we can find some other survivors. Or maybe we look for somewhere better, somewhere safer. I don't know.”

  “I think I've worked it out now,” Kim said. “It's the future, that's why you’re obsessed with the past.”

  “I'm sorry?” I asked.

  “The future, it's uncertain, and you want to escape from the uncertainty. You think that if you keep running away, then one day you'll arrive somewhere. What you don't understand is that sometimes away is all that matters.”

  Kim doesn't talk much. Perhaps that doesn't come across in what I've written, but what I've written down includes pretty much everything that we've said to one
another. It's not that we don't have anything to talk about, rather it is that neither of us has anything that needs to be said. For the most part, I have enjoyed this quiet companionship, right up until she goes and says something like that. She didn't say another word as I went on to check the cars at the next three houses we searched.

  This last one, where we found the second bicycle in the garden shed, and where we have decided to spend the night, has a little runabout in the garage. A four door car with barely enough space for two. The battery wasn't flat, the fuel tank was half full, the tyres needed a bit of inflating, but otherwise it seemed sound. I thought about turning the engine over. But I stayed my hand. It would have been easy to take it, and really, how much noise would that engine have made? Surely we could have driven back to the Abbey with only a few zombies following. Two or three, or five or even ten wouldn't be a problem. We have the rifle, after all. Then, there would still be enough fuel left to get to Lenham, and back. Probably I would have taken the car, if it hadn't been for the note, sealed in a plastic folder, nailed to the front door.

  “Dear Andie, we've gone to Maeve's. We'll be alright, you know us. But if you read this, come and look for us there. We left Gertie for you. We love you, Mum and Dad.”

  We found the car keys, along with six bottles of water, half a kilo of pasta, a jar of honey and two tubes of concentrated tomato purée, hidden in a box underneath a pile of ancient teddy bears. The one on the top, a hand stitched ragged thing, missing an eye and half an ear, had a ribbon around its neck that read, “Love, Grandma Gertie”.