by Frank Tayell
Inside was a simple office with three desks, and another door.
“The phones are in there,” Jones said, pointing at the door.
“This is seriously reinforced,” Sholto said, examining it. “It’s almost like a bank vault. We can’t pick it, or force it. I’ll need to cut it open. Although it might be easier hacking a hole through this wall.” He stabbed his knife into the plaster.
“Or you could use the key,” Jones said. She opened a drawer in the nearest desk, then another. “Here.”
“The keys are in the desk? That doesn’t seem like much of a security precaution,” I said.
“Calling a sister in Australia isn’t a sackable offence,” Jones said. “Taking the key from the drawer and using it enter a secure room is.”
“They were trying to encourage theft?” Sholto asked.
“Only by one truly obstreperous professor,” she said. “The kind who got caught making phone calls to Australia, and then hired a lawyer to find a way to prove he’d done nothing wrong.”
Inside the sealed room were metal filing cabinets.
“Which one is it?” Sholto asked.
“No idea,” Jones said.
“What else is here?” I asked as Sholto went from one to another.
“Exam papers,” Jones said. “And I’m not sure what else.”
I wandered back into the hallway, my mind on the buildings we’d seen, trying to come up with a strategy to salvage everything from the town.
“Bill, you got your bag?” Sholto called.
The phones were bulkier than I’d been expecting, a little deeper and taller than an old dial-pad mobile.
“So what now?” I asked, pressing the power button. Nothing happened.
“They have to be charged, and I’ll need some tablets to use as screens,” Sholto said. “And I’ll need to install some software on those. After that, it’ll just take two or three hours and a clear line of sight.”
“You’ve been carrying around software to hack into a satellite network since the outbreak?” Lorraine asked as we filled the bag.
“No,” he said. “Bill has.”
“I have?”
“It was bundled with the files you downloaded. Didn’t you notice?”
“I didn’t really look,” I said. “Before the power went out, before Prometheus, I was just copying as much as I could. There wasn’t time to look through it all. After the power went out, there was never enough electricity to look at more than a few videos at a go. Then we found you, and since then, I’ve not seen the point.”
“We’re done here?” Jones asked as the last phone was put in the bag. “Then we can go to the pier.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s taken us longer than I thought. We won’t have long to wait for the tide.”
Jones led us away from the finance building and back into the narrow roads. Once again, I was lost and disorientated. I made a mental note to carry a compass from now on, and then remembered that, back in Caernarfon, I’d made a note to visit the firing range.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Sholto said. “Walking through an empty town like this, but knowing safety is a few hundred metres away.”
“Hardly knowing,” Jones said. “The sat-phones, they work on line of sight with a satellite?”
“Yeah, so you can’t use them inside a building unless you hold the transmitter close to a window,” he said.
“We’ve been using ship-to-shore radios,” she said. “The emergency kind, but you’ve got to have line of sight with the receiving antenna. That’s fine when the signal’s going from the top of a boat’s mast to the school, relayed via the antenna on the crane at the docks. That would be utterly useless right now, when I want to tell the rest of my crew where we are.”
“She’s worried Lilith’s going to play the hero,” Lorraine said. The good cheer had returned to her voice. “It’s her favourite game.” She pointed at a battered road sign pointing to a customer car park, and added, “Supermarket.”
“The food’s all gone, surely?” I said.
“It is,” Jones said, “but the freezers aren’t, nor are the chiller cabinets. We’ve so many fish being caught that we could stockpile enough for a year. They’ll wait. Everything can wait, in fact. I want to get to the pier. If we don’t, Lilith will only charge through the town, searching for us.”
“And we’ll end up rescuing her,” Lorraine said. “Again.”
Jones gestured to an alley that I was seventy percent sure led north. On one side was a terraced house with an architecturally out of place window overlooking the alley. Bracketing it on the other side was a detached cottage with a garden wall two feet higher than the terrace’s window. The wall, made of cheap yellow brick, looked as new as the window.
“What was it Robert Frost said about fences and neighbours,” I muttered.
Something metal rattled behind us. I spun around, but the road was empty.
“A can caught in the breeze?” Sholto asked.
“What breeze? Maybe it’s a cat?” Lorraine suggested.
We eyed the apparently empty road behind us, then the narrow alley in front. It widened after twenty feet, but then curved out of sight as it ran behind the houses.
“There’s another way,” Jones said, gesturing eastwards. The mutual good humour we’d shared at being outside and heading towards safety evaporated as we passed a car that had crashed into the front of a knitting shop. The ripe smell of rotting wool was added to that of the dead city. More windows were broken in the houses along the road, making me wonder about the cluster bombs that had fallen on Anglesey, and whether any had struck Bangor as well. We reached a junction and took a left, following the very welcome sign pointing towards the pier.
After fifty curving, erratic yards, we came to a blue-windowed orange-brick building, about a hundred metres long and three storeys high.
“Another university building?” Sholto asked.
“Undergrad accommodation,” Jones said.
“That’s all?” he asked.
“What do you mean, all?”
“Can’t you see the door? There’s a lock on it.”
We crossed the road, getting near enough to the building that I could see the bicycle D-lock running through the door’s handles.
“There’s really nothing but student rooms inside?” Sholto asked.
“Nothing,” Jones said.
“So why lock it?” Lorraine asked, glancing up at the dark windows. “I mean, what’s to loot from a student room?”
“Everything,” I said. “It makes sense when you think about it. A student arrives with their possessions in suitcases. There’re no fridges in the rooms, right? So the only things they buy, aside from digital downloads, are a few more clothes, snacks, drinks, and non-perishable sundries.”
“Toilet paper,” Lorraine murmured, with a touch of wistful longing. “Yeah, okay. And the suitcases would still be in the—”
Wood banged against the D-lock as something slammed into the door. It rattled and shook, and opened two inches. Something was pushing, and there was only one thing that could be. Before anyone could shout out to name it, fingers curled through the gap and around the doorframe.
“Damn it!” Lorraine marched up to the door, shoved the barrel through the narrow gap, and pulled the trigger. She’d switched her gun to fully automatic. In a matter of seconds, the magazine was emptied into the building. She stepped back. The door swung closed.
“That was stupid,” Jones said.
“Maybe,” Lorraine said. “But it made me feel—”
A fist beat against wood, then another. The door shook as the unseen undead kicked, slapped, and punched against the door. The hinges shuddered.
“We should go,” I said. “Now. I don’t know if that door’s going to hold.”
Lorraine had reached the road when the first face slammed into the window. Sholto raised his gaze and the barrel of his gun. He held his fire as the zombie slammed its head into the pane. The glass would be reinfo
rced. By law, student accommodation required a studier standard of glass than you could get away with in normal rental properties, but it wouldn’t withstand a sustained and continuous barrage of face and fist.
We walked quickly along the road, and I wished the low wall that separated it from the building was higher. A hand slammed against the window of one of the rooms, then at another ten-metres along and one-storey up. There was a rumbling from inside the building, louder than I’d heard from trapped undead before.
“How many are in there?” Lorraine asked, giving voice to my own fears. We quickened our pace, but by the time we’d reached the far end of the building, no windows had broken.
“That door’s chained, too,” Sholto said, sweeping his gun from the door to the windows, but no undead faces peered down at us. The door was secured by a chain with a padlock. Before I could tell whether it was the same make as the one on the faculty building, the door shook, shuddered, and split from top to bottom in a line parallel to the handles. The zombies fell over one another as they found themselves pushing against air. Three, then five, then ten tumbled outside. There were more behind, a bobbing wave of heads and arms.
Lorraine opened fire. Her rifle was still set to fully automatic. Bullets sprayed into flesh and brick. The recoil raised the rifle’s barrel. The last two rounds hit the windows above and to the right of the door. Glass shattered, raining down on the undulating pile of zombies squirming to get to their feet. A moment later, glass was joined by a falling creature as a zombie toppled through the broken window.
Sholto fired a shot, and then another, and then more, with barely half a second between each. Jones joined in.
“Bill, watch the ones on the ground,” she said, sending a shot into the long, dark hallway. “Lorraine, eyes on the window.”
Lorraine loaded a fresh magazine and turned her shaking barrel towards the broken window. They fired shot after shot into the mass of undead pushing and squirming their way outside. I didn’t think it was going to work. Fists pounded against glass at almost every window. The zombies outside were slowly pulling themselves apart and to their feet.
“I’m going in,” I yelled, and darted forward, spearing the pike into the face of a prone, partially trampled creature crawling towards us. Only when I darted back a pace, and the firing resumed, did I realise they’d paused. It could work. No, it was going to work. The zombies were like fish in a barrel. Their numbers made them an easy target. The rifle’s high rate of fire made it merely a question of whether we had enough ammo. Another zombie pushed itself to its feet.
“I’m going in,” I yelled again, and again slammed the spear into a rotting face.
No more had appeared at the broken window. The twice-dead creatures inside the doorway were forming a barrier, slowing down the zombies behind. Dim daylight at the far end silhouetted hands and arms, and I was sure there weren’t as many as before.
“Hold your fire,” I barked. I stabbed the spear at a necrotic head, pulled it back, then hacked down on the skull of a creature unable to stand. I stepped back and let the firing resume. It was going to work. I was sure of it right up until I looked around.
“Run!” I yelled. “Run!”
They were coming up the road down which we’d walked. Rank upon rank, a dozen wide and I don’t know how many deep. The firing slackened.
“Lorraine! The pier! Run!” Jones called, grabbing the woman’s arm and dragging her a step. Sholto switched aim, firing a shot into the undead column. A zombie spun back, but I don’t think the bullet hit its head. It didn’t matter. There were a hundred at least, and perhaps the same number inside the building.
“I could see daylight,” I said as I limped, and my brother jogged, away from the building.
“What?”
“Daylight,” I said. “It was silhouetting their hands. The door at the other end broke. I should have realised.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” he said, turning around, and firing twice. “It surely doesn’t matter.”
“What if the boats are gone?” I asked Jones when we caught up. She and Lorraine had slowed their run to a walk.
“They won’t,” Jones said, tracking the rifle along the dark windows of the houses to our left. “Simon and Lilith won’t leave.”
“But what if they had to?” I insisted.
“This was the plan,” Jones said, training the rifle on the houses to the right. “We go into the city and lure the zombies to the pier. That’s why they’re building a barricade.”
“You might have mentioned that we were playing bait,” Sholto said.
“We’re always playing bait,” Jones said. “Always will be, right up until we die.”
This road was wider, wide enough that I felt confident calling it a road not an alley. Cars were actually parked outside most houses, rather than just lining the kerb where they’d been dumped. Most of the homes were detached, with old-stone walls and wooden fencing to offer a modicum of privacy.
“This was the plan?” I asked, glancing back down the road. The zombies were following as thrashingly fast as they could, but there was an easy hundred yards between us and them.
“Not quite this,” Jones said, “but more or less. It takes a day to bring a boat over. Another day to empty somewhere and bring the loot to the shore. We can’t afford the time to salvage goods as and when we need them. We have to be systematic. Take a large group, empty a large building, fill up a large boat, and all those rafts we were going to take to Belfast. Do it once. One week, one city, and then leave the ruins to the undead.”
“Nice to be kept in the loop,” Sholto said, raising his rifle. I don’t think he fired, but I saw three zombies in the lead rank trip and fall, to be trampled by those coming behind.
“Broad beans!” Lorraine said. “I think that’s right.”
I turned to look. We were passing a house with a six-foot pine fence behind a low wall. Trailing over the top were a few broad leaves.
“Make a note,” I said, returning my attention to the road. The zombies were a hundred and fifty yards away. They weren’t slowing. “We’ll come back to check it later.”
There was a sigh, a crack. I spun around as the fence broke. Lorraine raised her hand to her eyes as splinters flew from the breaking fence and a zombie lurched over the wall. It landed face first onto the road, but its outstretched arm caught on her leg. She fell, losing her grip on her rifle. I skipped forward, kicking at the prone creature’s skull, pushing it over, before stabbing the pike down, two-handed.
“You okay?” I asked. Lorraine clutched her leg. I saw the blood.
“Fine. I’m immune. Hurts, though.” There were three wheals on her leg from the creature’s clawing hand. I dropped the pike, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up.
“Can you walk?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Jones raised her gun, firing through the broken fencing and into the garden. I didn’t see the zombies, but I saw her expression, and didn’t need her barked command of “Move” to know we had to hurry.
“You should draw that,” she said as we limped away.
“What?”
“Your gun.”
Again, I’d forgotten the pistol was even there.
The sound of the sea told us we were getting close, as did the presence of the zombies. It was one, then two, then four, then more. All had been shot in the head, some with multiple wounds in the chest or limbs. We gave a pub with a corpse sagging from a broken window a wide berth, and saw the sea. We’d reached the headland on which the pier jutted out into the strait. Just where the road curved sharply to the left as it followed the coastline, cars and vans had been pushed together to form a quarter-circular ring. Pub tables and house furniture had been piled up between the vehicles, on the roof of which stood Simon, Lilith, and the rest of the crew. In their hands were rifles, and in front were at least fifty bodies that were a testament to how they’d been used.
Simon gave a curt wave, and then continued his scanning of t
he road behind us. The brevity of the acknowledgement was enough to make us hurry as we picked our way through the corpses. Hands reached down to help us up the side of a blue-panelled van.
“About two hundred,” Jones said, “coming this way, two minutes behind.”
“Hear that?” Simon called out. “Ripped your trousers,” he added, speaking to Lorraine.
“Really?” she said. “I hadn’t noticed. Where’re the bandages?”
“With the ammo.” Lilith gestured towards the pier.
“Would you mind?” she asked me before giving Simon a glare.
I helped Lorraine down and towards the pier. Ammunition, spare rifles, first-aid kits, a crate of water bottles, and what I assumed was food had been unloaded and neatly stored near the secured boats.
“There, bandages,” Lorraine said. “Can you look for some disinfectant? It’ll be in a purple bottle.”
“Purple? Here,” I said, holding up a litre bottle.
“Purple for disinfectant,” she said, splashing it on her leg. “Green or blue for drinking water, and never mix the two up.”
“Something else we should have been told earlier,” I murmured. Then the firing began.
Sholto and Jones had taken up positions at either end of the line. Lilith and Simon were in the middle. The others were on the roofs of cars and vans in between. Except for Simon, they were all kneeling. I couldn’t see what they were aiming at, but I could hear it. That low snuffling, rustling, groaning noise grew in volume until it drowned out the sound of the waves. The suppressed shots were inaudible, as were the falling bodies, so there was no way of gauging how the battle was progressing.
“I need your hands,” Lorraine said. “Can you hold the bandage?”
“What? Sorry.” I held the fabric as she taped it off.
“Right, help me up. Thanks.” She tested the leg. “Pass me a rifle and grab that bag of ammo.”
There were ten spare SA80s stacked on the pier. I slung one on my back, and she did the same. One hand supporting her, the other carrying the bag of pre-loaded magazines, I helped her back to the barricade.
