“Wait until next year’s harvest,” Kim said. “Then we’ll know how impressive it is.”
“Sure, but all told, and not counting those who arrived on the Harper’s Ferry, that’s nearly five hundred more people who left their boats and came ashore.”
“And that still leaves nine and a half thousand who’d prefer a damp boat to a dry bed,” Kim said. “But we’re getting off the point. We chose Rob. After that, and before we arrived here, someone spoke to him. They told him about the tunnel linking the mansion at Elysium with the barns. They told him about the embarkation list, and where to find it. You wrote…” She flicked through the journal. “Here. He said he was told that we brought him with us so that we could kill him. That’s the important detail. It’s the reason he tried to kill us. Do you see? Someone wants us dead, Bill. Not Rob, someone else.”
“Ah. Yes, okay. I hadn’t thought of it like that. Well, that truly is grim news with which to start the day.”
“Rob was meant to kill us,” Kim said. “The tunnel, and that list, were his way to escape from Ireland afterwards.”
“What’s the name of the village on the embarkation list? Pallaskenry? I don’t think Rob would have survived long enough to reach it.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Kim asked. “He escaped from Penrith. Just because he was a vile excuse for humanity doesn’t mean he didn’t know how to survive.” She took out the two sheets of paper. “Embarkation, that’s the title of this list, and it’s an odd one. An odd title, and an odd list of addresses. And this other sheet is only numbers. I wonder what they mean. I wonder if these numbers might be the prize. That whoever wanted us dead, wanted this list of numbers for… for what? And these addresses, why is the piece of paper called embarkation. Embark to where? How?”
“You think it might have been Rachel?” I asked. “Kempton employed a lot of women, and most of the zombies and corpses in Elysium that wore her uniform were women.”
“Most but not all,” Kim said. “It might be Rachel. I don’t know.” She put the list back in the journal, and closed it. “That’s what I meant. There’re a lot of questions. We’re not going to find the answers here, but when we get back to Anglesey, I want to put them to Captain Devine. In fact, as soon as we get on the ship, I want to call her on the sat-phone and have her question Rachel again. Markus, too. Everyone in that pub, in fact.”
“Just as soon as we get back,” I said, and headed to the bathroom. When I returned to the living room, I found Kim had the journal open again. “It wasn’t Rachel,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“It can’t have been her. Here, at the end. Rob told you that you made Rachel kill Paul. That means it can’t have been her. Unless… no.” She closed the journal. “We’re going around in circles. Better we head in a straight line, and that towards the coast. That embarkation list is going to bother me, though.” She walked to where the guns were stacked. “Do you remember that movie that came out during the summer? The one where the Earth was going to be hit by an asteroid, so they built a spaceship for a thousand people and sent them to Proxima Centauri?”
“And it would take them generations to reach it, yes,” I said. “I didn’t see it, but I can tell you Kempton didn’t build something like that.”
“Of course not,” Kim said. “If she’d had that kind of money, she’d have built more than three satellites. No, what brought it mind was that the passengers all had a plastic card. On it was the address of the secret bunker they had to go to, and the code number they had to type in to gain access.”
“Well, don’t spoil it,” I said. “I might watch it someday.”
“You won’t, Bill. It hadn’t been released on DVD before the outbreak. I suppose it’s stuck on some server in Hollywood, but unless you saw it at the cinema, you’ll never see it now. Anyway, maybe that’s what the list of numbers are, an access code for somewhere or something. You ready?”
“More or less.” I put the journal into my pack, and grabbed my belt from where I’d hung it on the corner of the chair. There was an empty loop where the hatchet should hang, but I’d lost that in Elysium. Along with the torch and water bottle, I had a hunting knife and a 9mm pistol. Going armed had become second nature, though it always came with a wistful longing for the old world when it had been unnecessary.
“How much ammo are we taking?” I asked. It was neatly stacked on the room’s table.
“I’ve fifty-three rounds for my L115A3,” Kim said, picking up the British Army sniper’s rifle. “There’s six hundred and forty rounds of 5.56mm for the SA80, and four hundred and thirty-two rounds for the MP5.”
I took in the rows of magazines, and the two smaller rows of loose ammunition.
“More than we can carry,” I said.
“Well, more than we can carry if we plan on getting far,” Kim said. “It’s only because he was loaded down with it, that we managed to catch Rob. Four magazines apiece will do. You take the MP5.” She passed me the submachine gun. “I’ll take my rifle and the SA80.” She began slotting magazines into her pockets.
“I doubt I’d hit anything,” I said.
“I know, so don’t try,” she said. “The SA80 and my sniper’s rifle are silenced, but we’ve less ammo. If we can risk using the submachine gun, we should. You know, it’s odd, but even taking into account the ammunition Rob used, there should be more. We brought a lot more over with us on the boat.”
“There was none there when we left it,” I said. There had been nothing but Will and Lilith’s bullet-riddled bodies, lying in inches of water, as the equally bullet-riddled boat slowly sank.
“We’ll have to keep an eye out for it,” Kim said. “Rob must have dropped a bag or two. What do you want to do about the bayonet?”
It lay on the table. It was a better weapon than the hunting knife at my belt, but it was also the weapon Rob had used to kill Simon.
“It’s evidence,” I said. I wrapped it in a strip of curtain, and put it into my pack.
“We’ve got the water,” Kim said, touching the bottle at her belt. “But we’re leaving most of the food. You think that’s wise? Yes,” she added before I could answer. “We can’t carry everything. If the boat hasn’t arrived, we’ll be back here soon enough. So what are we forgetting?”
“Nothing,” I said.
She smiled. “It’s weird. I’m not used to leaving a place with the intention of coming back.”
“And perhaps we won’t,” I said. “Perhaps we’ll get down to the coast, and find Sholto there and be back home before—”
“The Geiger counter,” she cut in. “No, that’s packed. The fire’s out? Yes. Okay, ready?”
I drew my hunting knife, and went to the front door. “No point wasting ammo,” I said.
Kim nodded.
I opened the door.
Chapter 1 - Ard na Mara, The Republic of Ireland
09:00, 22nd September, Day 194
Rob’s body lay at the edge of the drive, next to the living dead he’d shot before we’d found him. I ignored those, and concentrated on the zombie by the gate. As it saw me emerge from the house, its languid slapping became a vigorous swipe. Its mouth snapped open and closed. Its head rocked left and right. The latch rattled. The wood shook. The gate held. I raised the knife, bringing it level with the creature’s eyes, pale orbs amid mud-mottled skin. At some point, it must have fallen face-first in the dirt. Days, or maybe weeks, of occasional rain had washed runnels through its grim visage, giving it an almost camouflaged effect. Its arm swung out, clawing towards me. I batted it away, and lunged as I’ve done too many times to remember. The knife slid through the air and just as easily through its eye. With a practiced twist, I broke the sphenoid bone, and the wide blade plunged into its brain. Another twist, the knife was out, and the zombie fell lifeless to the ground. From stepping out of the house, it had taken less than ten seconds.
I opened the gate, and wiped the blade clean on the zombie’s coat. Apart from the mud, the material
was in reasonably good condition.
“It hasn’t been undead for long,” I said as Kim stepped onto the road.
“Which is either depressing, in that if we’d arrived sooner we might have found someone alive,” she said, closing the gate. “Or uplifting, in that there might still be survivors here in Ireland.”
We headed towards the coast. The air was saturated by a thin mist, which quickly seeped through my cheap cotton suit. The chauffeur’s uniform had come from the garage at Elysium, and it was utterly unsuitable for anything other than the interior of an air-conditioned car. Partly as a distraction from the growing discomfort, I concentrated on the hedgerows, the sky, and the road ahead, but nothing had changed since yesterday.
Kempton’s satellites, to which Sholto had gained access, had passed over Ireland as they’d been repositioned. Extrapolating from the photographs in which the ground wasn’t obscured by cloud gave a very dismal picture. We had images of Elysium, and a stretch of coast eastwards towards Cork. That ancient city had been ruined, as had the land along the east coast as far as Dublin. We didn’t know what lay around the border with Northern Ireland, though Belfast appeared as desolate as anywhere we’d been. The international airport was a mechanical graveyard, but one in which the runway might be intact. The only piece of good news was that the island seemed to be free of the million-strong hordes that plagued England and southern Scotland. Might. Seem. It was guesswork, that’s the truth of it. From the satellite images, we’d thought Elysium was empty. It wasn’t. A thousand zombies, give or take, had been hidden in the grounds. I think that they, or most of them, were inside the large barns to which the hidden tunnel led. We can’t really be sure.
We’re on a peninsula on the southern edge of Kenmare Bay, itself on the very southwestern edge of the Irish Republic. The bungalow is a couple of miles to the east of Kempton’s apocalyptic lair. The billionaire named her retreat Elysium, though the local authorities knew it as Ifreann, which I’m sure is Gaelic for Hell and the small revenge of some local translator. The yacht in which we’d sailed to Ireland was moored at an old concrete jetty outside the fifty-acre property’s walls. It was there that our rescue would come, and I’m sure it will come. Searching for me wasn’t my brother’s only motive in crossing the Atlantic a few weeks after the outbreak, but it was a large part of the reason. He’ll come. The question’s when.
The warmth of the bungalow, and the wonderfully hot tea, drifted into distant memory as the mist made a valiant effort at burrowing under my skin.
“We’re about three hundred and fifty miles from Anglesey?” Kim asked.
“Hmm? By sea, yes.”
“Three hundred and fifty miles,” Kim echoed. “Is that nautical miles or normal miles? I don’t suppose it matters. If Will had been on the sat-phone, speaking to Anglesey when Rob shot him and Lilith, a boat would have departed immediately. The Smuggler’s Salvation could make fifty miles an hour, more if the winds and tides were right. Or was that knots? I suppose that doesn’t matter, either. They might be able to travel at night, but they wouldn’t do it at full speed.”
“Probably not. And we’re assuming the Salvation was in Anglesey, and they’ve enough fuel from Svalbard to make the journey.”
“More importantly,” Kim said, “it’s assuming Will was on the phone at the time he was shot. What if he didn’t have time to make the call?”
“Well, I suppose that, some point last night, Sholto would have tried to call Will and Lilith. When there was no reply, he’d have sat up all night pressing redial. George would have told him not to worry, that the phone might have been dropped over the side of the boat. Sholto would worry anyway, and would, regardless of what else they were being used for, reposition a satellite so it was overhead.”
“How long would that take?” Kim asked.
“Three hours, I think. Though that’s a guess.”
“So the satellite would be overhead about now?” she asked. I didn’t need to look up to know the clouds were a thick blanket shielding us from view. “Let’s say he repositioned the satellites first thing this morning,” she continued. “How long will he stare at the screen, clicking refresh? A day? Two? Zombie, do you see it?”
I did, but I almost hadn’t. The creature crouched in a flooded ditch on the left-hand side of the road, partially hidden by a thicket of gorse. As we drew nearer, its hands scrabbled at the plant. Its thin black jacket was torn vertically a few inches from the zip. The tear was a result of a slashing blow. Judging by the almost clean, and very incongruous, dress shirt underneath, it was a recent cut. The mismatched clothing, the almost-human face, this was another of the recently alive. It lurched its way onto the road, bucking its head, pawing and clawing its arms.
I stopped fifteen feet away, and waited. My hands were raised, the knife-tip weaving back and forth as I tried to keep the point level with its juddering head. Ten feet. Eight. And in its last three steps, it seemed to speed up. From experience, I know that’s an optical illusion, but it always brings a moment of terror that, somehow, these creatures have learned to run.
I swung my left arm up, across its body, batting away its arms, and used its own momentum to pivot the creature around. I slammed my foot down on the back of its knee. It fell forward, still thrashing, landing face-first. I moved quickly, stabbing the knife through the back of its skull.
After cleaning the knife, I paused to go through the corpse’s pockets.
“What are you looking for?” Kim asked.
“Identification. A driver’s licence. A journal would be— Ah, here, a wallet. No cards. No cash. There’s a photograph.” Two men in suits, and two children in pushchairs, one in a shirt and slacks, the other in a blue dress. Next to them was a woman in blue jeans. The picture had been taken outdoors, in front of a fountain. I couldn’t tell whether the dirty, bearded corpse was one of the clean-shaven, clean-cut men in the picture. I returned the photograph to the wallet, and took out the only other item: a folded piece of paper.
“I think it was a letter,” I said. “There’s part of an address at the top, ‘love’ at the bottom, and… no, I can’t make out the name. Rain and blood have made it illegible.”
“Does it matter?” Kim asked. “Do you need to know?”
I folded the letter, put it back in the wallet, and put that back in the pocket of the corpse.
“He’s not been a zombie for long,” I explained as we continued down the road. “Neither was that zombie outside the bungalow. I don’t think they came from Elysium. If they had, then it means the gate broke, so where are the rest of them?”
“What’s your point?”
“Two people, recently infected. It can’t be a coincidence that they’re both in roughly the same place. Perhaps there are others survivors, somewhere close.”
“They were alive about a month ago,” Kim said. “Maybe less, but it wasn’t yesterday. It makes sense, though. People would run until there was no more land left, and this is about as far to the southwest as you can get. But you’re stalling, Bill. We both are. I know it’s obvious what we’re going to find at the shore, or what we won’t, but let’s get it done.”
The assault rifle Rob had discarded, and which Kim had placed with the barrel pointing in the direction we’d travelled, still lay in the middle of the junction with the coastal road. The presence of the weapon confirmed no rescue party had been that way.
The roar of the sea crashing against rock was so all-encompassing that, for two hundred yards, I could almost imagine being back in the old world. A holly bush, valiantly battling the Atlantic winds and salty spray, marked the point where the road detoured inland. A few yards in front of it were two of the undead. I gave a weary sigh. Kim must have heard me. She raised the rifle and fired two measured shots. One zombie fell, then the next. There was a twin thump as the bodies hit the ground louder than I’d been expecting.
“Best wait,” Kim murmured, before I could say the same. We watched the road, wondering whether more zombies w
ould appear. If they did, the last place we wanted to be was trapped on a few dozen yards of spray-slick rocks between a dry-stone wall and the raging sea. One minute, two, five, and the road remained empty of the undead. It also remained empty of the sound of a ship’s engine. We climbed over the wall.
Heather and gorse were interspersed with shallow puddles where spray and rain had worn indentations in the rocky outcrop.
“It reminds me of Svalbard,” Kim said.
“Really? Whenever I think of the Arctic, I always imagine it snowing.” I spoke as a distraction from the water dripping down my legs into my boots.
“It wasn’t snowing while we were there,” she said, “but I was thinking of the journey. Going from one deck to another was more like swimming than walking. Despite its design, I don’t think The Smuggler’s Salvation was built for the open sea, more like the Med or… what’s the U.S. equivalent? Where did billionaire Americans sail their yachts?”
“Florida? The Caribbean?” I suggested. “I’m not sure. It’s a tad beyond my experience.”
She sighed. “Imagine the Caribbean. The sun, the sand… and don’t say it won’t be like that now. I want to revel in the fantasy.”
The rocky coast bulged further from the road, and our pace slowed again. It wasn’t simply that neither of us wanted to slip on the slick rocks, it was that we knew we’d find the shore empty. We were right.
The yacht in which we’d sailed over to Ireland was now fully submerged. The mast was tilted at an angle, rocking left and right with each surge of the tide. Will and Lilith’s bodies were invisible, hidden by the dark and foamy water.
“They were good people,” I said, but wished I hadn’t. It was trite, meaningless, yet something had to be said. That was the only grave either of them would have, and the moment should be marked.
“They were,” Kim said. “And we won’t forget them.”
We stood in silence for a minute, then two. Finally Kim turned to look out to sea. “There’s nothing.”
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland Page 2
