“Let me play the advocate for a moment more,” I said. “Didn’t Yolinda Day also mention some people had left?”
“Ah, yes!” Kim said with gleeful triumph. She picked up the journal and pointed at the page. “Sorcha Locke. Kempton’s representative in Ireland if not on Earth. It says she took a group to the garage. They have to be the zombies you killed. But even if some of them survived, and escaped from the estate, that means even less of Kempton’s followers were there to become infected. Don’t you see? There’re too many people. Too many fleeces. If they didn’t come from the house, they had to come from somewhere else. Kempton’s people came to Elysium after Yolinda Day died! It was meant to be an apocalyptic retreat, wasn’t it?”
“So some employees elsewhere in Ireland came here,” I said.
“Where’s that embarkation list.” She pulled out the folded pieces of paper we’d taken from Rob’s corpse. “Elysium isn’t mentioned. Which is the one you said is in Ireland?”
“This one, Pallaskenry.” I pointed at the address about halfway down the page. “It’s on the southern side of the Shannon Estuary, about ten miles due south of Shannon Airport.”
“How do you know about it?” she asked.
“Airport expansion,” I said. “A lot of the legal challenges were connected to noise pollution. There was a study that used Shannon. They monitored planes using different flight paths, flying over different villages at different altitudes. It was quite famous because the methodology was more than a tad controversial. Airports used it to prove that there wouldn’t be as great a noise increase as their opponents suggested.”
“Ah, okay,” she said, utterly disinterested. “So maybe Pallaskenry’s where the extra people came from. Or is it where the people in Elysium were meant to go?”
“Sholto said there were other properties like Elysium,” I said. “And Yolinda Day wrote that Kempton herself wasn’t in the mansion. Surely Kempton would have gone to one of her retreats. Perhaps it was overrun. She and the last of her followers managed to get to Ireland, and then to Elysium, but they were infected by the undead already there.”
Kim put the list back in the journal. “You’re probably right, and that means all of Kempton’s hideaways have been destroyed. I suppose that’s for the best, but it’s a pity. Places like that, with the walls, the wind turbines, the guns and ammo; they could have been fortresses, refuges, sanctuaries. Instead, they’re just more tombs for the living dead.”
Chapter 3 - The Bay View Hotel, Kenmare Bay
24th September, Day 196
“You hear that?” Kim whispered, abruptly stopping. We were five hundred yards from the junction with the coastal road. I couldn’t hear anything, and that told me a lot. An unnatural silence had settled over our corner of Ireland.
Kim raised the rifle, gave the submachine gun on my shoulder a meaningful look, and took a sliding step forward. I followed, ten paces behind, but left the MP5 hanging on my back. I could draw the weapon quickly enough. What there wasn’t time for was learning how to fire it with any great precision.
Another hundred yards, and Kim stopped again. I took another step and saw why. There were five zombies in the road. I couldn’t tell if any wore fleeces, but they were upright, and slowly lumbering in our direction.
“I’m going to hold my fire until they’re closer,” Kim whispered.
That was fine with me. Before I could say so, there was a sound from behind. Branches ripped and roots tore as a pair of zombies tumbled through the hedge topping the four-foot-high embankment. They landed in the ditch, spraying muddy water as they thrashed and twisted to their feet.
“I’ve got them. Watch the road,” I said as, knife out, I jumped into the ditch. I stabbed down, twisted the blade, and jumped back from a clawing hand. I sliced the knife forward, slashing at the zombie’s desiccated flesh, cutting through skin and scoring bone, but zombies feel no pain. Its arm grasped out. I batted it away, grabbed the zombie’s neck, and plunged the knife through its eye.
“More coming!” Kim called. “Too many.”
Mud and gore dripping from every inch of my body, I pulled myself out of the ditch.
“How many,” I asked, but could see them for myself. They weren’t moving quickly, zombies never did, but at least thirty were in view, heading towards us. There was a sound from behind. Another three appeared at the new gap in the hedgerow.
“Time to run,” Kim said. She dashed across the road and up the embankment the other side. There was no hedge surrounding that field, just three strands of wire. My mud-coated boots found no purchase on the boggy incline. I slipped, and fell forward. Kim held out her rifle. I grabbed it, and she hauled me up.
From the slight elevation I saw the field on the other side of the country road, and beyond it the distant wall that ran around Elysium. It looked intact, but there were undead near it, all heading this way.
“I’d say fifty in the field,” I said.
“Forty on the road,” Kim said. “And that’s all we can see. All from Elysium, I guess.”
“We won’t get to the jetty.”
“Or back to the bungalow,” she said. “Not without a fight.”
I spared a glance at the tin of paint lying on the road where I’d dropped it. The tin had come from the bungalow. Our plan had been to paint a message on the jetty, spend a day looking for supplies in any nearby houses, then hunker down until the boat came.
“We don’t have the ammo,” I said. Theoretically, we were carrying more than enough. Aside from my sidearm, we had three magazines for the MP5, four for the SA80, and fifty rounds for Kim’s sniper’s rifle. It wasn’t worth wasting it to kill the undead on the road, not when the sound of the battle would only summon more.
“We wanted to look for supplies,” I said. “There’s no time like the present.” I’d meant it to be upbeat, to be cheerful, optimistic, but the words were barely audible over the growing susurrus from the undead.
The field’s elevation relative to the road meant the undead couldn’t easily follow us. The thick, loamy soil, sodden with weeks of rain, meant we couldn’t easily walk, let alone run. It took an eternity to reach the three wires marking the far end of the field. Beyond was probably a paddock, but it might have been rural wasteland. The going was no easier, and when we stopped at a wall separating it from another acre of muddy grass and gorse, I could still see the point where we’d climbed up from the road. I could see the undead that had followed us. Only five had made it up the side of the embankment. Five so far.
“You see what they’re wearing?” I said. “Fleeces. That first one you shot was the same.”
“You sure?” Kim’s hand dropped to the sniper’s rifle hanging on her back. It had an optical sight. She changed her mind. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It confirms the theory,” I said. “And you wouldn’t wear a fleece jacket in June, and they didn’t become infected recently, so they must have come here in March or April.”
“That definitely doesn’t matter. Not now,” she said. “Which way?”
“East and inland,” I said. “What other direction is there?”
We followed the wall until it met a track, and then followed that until it led back to a road, which, according to the compass, headed due east. On firmer ground, we made better progress, but it’s never enough to simply outpace the undead. They’ll lurch onward, day and night, in pursuit of their prey. The greater their number, the longer that pursuit will continue. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that one zombie on its own might stop, adopting a sedentary pose after an hour or day. The hundred or more following us wouldn’t.
“Could we do it?” Kim asked.
“Do what? Kill them?” I asked.
“No, retake Elysium. If they’ve left the mansion, we might be able to get back inside. There’s more ammunition there, but is there enough?”
“You tell me,” I said. “Since it’d be you who was doing the shooting, but there isn’t food. That’s what we need more th
an anything. Enough supplies that we can wait until the boat arrives.”
“If only we knew it was coming,” she muttered. “Or when it was coming.” She kicked at a clod of moss. “But it’s not raining. The air’s fresh… um… and if I have time, I’m sure I can think of a third thing.”
“That’s it,” I said cheerily, “let’s look on the bright side. You’re always saying we spend far too much time cooped up inside.”
She snorted, a brief laugh cut short as the road bent, and we saw a great mass of the living dead in the middle of the track. They were squatting, motionless, and for the briefest of moments, I thought they were all dead. The pile moved, shifted, and straightened as the zombies stood.
“Too many,” Kim said, and we returned to the fields.
Fields. Tracks. Road. Fields. Tracks. Road. It became a routine. Every four or five hundred yards, we came across the motionless undead on the road, and that forced us into the fields, but the ground was too uneven for us to make good progress. Some had been ploughed, others left fallow. One had been planted, a year before, with a winter crop of cabbage. The cabbages had seeded, but, after a year without pesticides, had been become a feast for insects. After twenty minutes, we’d found four with thick, leathery leaves that even the slugs had ignored, and wasted too much time doing it. We hurried on, though we had neither destination in mind, nor known refuge ahead.
When possible, we walked along the fences and walls between the fields where the ground was firmer, though not by much, but those walls rarely ran due east. Clouds gathered. The sky darkened. Heavy drops fell, large enough to hear each droplet thud into the drift of leaf-litter gathered in the lee of the old stones. The rain brought a moment of relief, a second where I basked in the knowledge that the undead would hear the weather, not us. Then the torrent was unleashed, and a wall of water fell from the sky.
“Think of it as a shower,” I said. “A much welcome wash.”
Kim didn’t hear me, and I couldn’t trick myself into believing the lie. We reached a battered gate, and beyond it was a track. We trudged on, neither of us noticing that the ground was getting firmer until I almost walked into a sign. We’d reached a road without even realising. I could barely see the asphalt beneath my feet, let alone more than a few yards in either direction.
“We need shelter!” Kim yelled.
“I was thinking the same,” I said. I don’t think Kim heard me. I was about to repeat it when I sensed something behind me. I spun around, knocking the zombie’s arms back just as it lunged forward, teeth snapping. I sidestepped and pivoted, pulling the creature down. I raised my foot, about to stamp on its head when a weight pushed into me. Another zombie. Its arms tangled in my cheap suit. I grabbed and pushed, but slipped and fell to my knees. Kim’s rifle-butt slammed into the zombie’s face. Its grip loosened. As I scrabbled back to my feet, Kim slammed the gun into the creature’s head again. She changed her grip, and fired a shot straight into its skull, shifted aim to the first zombie, firing five times before she was sure it was dead.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine. Fine. You’re right, we need shelter.”
The best we found was the lee of an old tree ten yards down the road. There could have been a castle in the next field for all we could see. I unslung the submachine gun. There was no point worrying about noise, not now. We stared into the storm, saying nothing as water dripped down the tree’s trunk.
After thirty minutes, the sky lightened, and the rain eased. It didn’t stop, but visibility grew, and the horizon was pushed far enough away that we could once again see the curving, undulating shape of the fields and farmland through which the road cut. I was so thoroughly soaked, I hadn’t thought my spirits could sink even lower. How wrong I was. Bones stuck out of the field opposite, half-buried in mud, and all picked clean. I assume they belonged to cows. They were too large to be human.
We trudged on. Muddy rivulets ran down from the banked fields either side. All sense of how far we’d travelled, of what time it was, had gone. The sun was still up, and part of me thought it couldn’t yet be lunchtime, but I wasn’t certain. All I wanted was a house with a roof and walls, though I’d have settled for one or the other as long it was somewhere we could drip-dry in peace. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. Just when I was about to scream, the wind stopped, the sky cleared, and the sun emerged from behind the clouds. I won’t say it warmed the cold air, but there was enough heat on my face to push despair back until the road crested a hill and, from the top, we saw the sea.
The road we were on curved down the hill, and then over a bridge that crossed a river. Beyond the bridge, and built around a bay into which the river fed, were dozens of roofs.
“Shelter,” I said.
“Kenmare Bay,” Kim said. “It has to be.”
My instinct was to say that we’d surely travelled further than that, but she was right. We’d only got as far as Kenmare Bay, on the inland edge of the peninsula on which Elysium had been built.
“You see the boats,” Kim said. “The wrecks.”
Floating wreckage would be as accurate. We were still half a mile away, but it was obvious that none of it was seaworthy, not even the triple-masted sailing ship that had sunk on the seaward side of the bridge.
“It reminds me of that place near Kew,” Kim said.
“Teddington Lock? Yes, it does a bit, but give it a few months and the channel will be clear.”
“Until some other boat’s caught by the tide. Here.” She passed me the SA80 and unslung the sniper’s rifle. She peered through the scope. “No… I can’t see any zombies on the boats. The bridge looks— Ah, no. There’s one, and where there’s one… but there’re too many stalled vehicles to be sure. What do you think?”
“That we need shelter, we need clothes, we need food.” I couldn’t see any rooftops on our side of the bridge, but there would be some. I found myself looking in the direction of Elysium. “We need to get away from the undead. It’ll be safer on the other side of the bridge.”
The bridge was built on a narrow promontory that jutted into the bay, with the town of Kenmare beyond the northern side. From the southern end we couldn’t see the town, or even much of the road leading to it. There were too many large trees, still coated in leaves of summer green and every shade of autumnal red. The bridge was two lanes wide, and three hundred feet of stalled traffic long. Either side was hemmed in by a pair of concrete arches that rose up to about twenty feet at the quarter-way mark, and then dropped to road-level halfway across before rising again to a peak at the three-quarter point. On the seaward side was a narrow pedestrian walkway with a waist-high handrail. Fifty feet from us, a blue hybrid had driven halfway through the barrier. Its front wheels were balanced precariously over the flotsam-strewn water. Between us and the hybrid was an ambulance, skewed across both lanes. In front of the ambulance were four bodies. Probably undead. Hopefully, they’d been undead. It was impossible to tell, as they’d been crushed by the passage of a vehicle far larger than the ambulance.
“Where did you see the zombie?” I whispered.
“Behind the ambulance.” The sound of wood, metal, fibreglass, and plastic washing against the bridge’s concrete supports almost drowned out her reply. Kim gestured she’d take the right. I moved to the left. I took step after cautious step closer to the monstrous green and neon-yellow vehicle. With each downward footfall, I expected the zombie to appear. Another step. Another. I could hear nothing over the sound of the sea, not even Kim. Perhaps she’d been wrong. Perhaps the shapes she’d seen weren’t the undead. The ambulance’s cab was empty. The discarded wrappers from sterile bandages littered both seats. I looked through the grimy windows, but couldn’t see Kim. Then I heard it, and I think they’d heard me. That familiar rustle of cloth, that creak of bone, the pop of air in a rotting joint, then the rasp of air expelled from the decaying lungs of the living dead.
I loped around the edge of the ambulance and saw three of them, rising in
unison. I grabbed the shoulder of the nearest and stabbed the knife into its eye. It died quickly. Too quickly. So quickly that, as it fell, I lost hold of the blade. I was unarmed. The other two were on their feet. They lurched a step. I balled my fists. I heard the soft whistle of a bullet. The red-haired head of the zombie on my right was blown apart. The last zombie lunged forward, snapping its mouth, clawing its hands towards me. I stepped forward, into its grasp, and grabbed the back of its head with both hands. I turned, twisted, and slammed its face into the side of the ambulance. Cartilage crunched. Bone broke. It wasn’t enough. The zombie wasn’t dead. It moved, thrashing out of my grip. Its hands smashed into the ambulance as it spun itself around. I punched out, acting on reflex, aiming for its spine. The blow connected, but the zombie didn’t stop. Its hands found my throat. I bit down a frustrated scream and slammed my leg down on its shin. Bone snapped. It tried to put weight on its broken leg and fell to the ground.
“Out of the way!” Kim said, as I stepped back. She fired. The bullet went through its brain. “Okay?”
“Twice in one day,” I said. “I need a better weapon.”
“Later,” Kim said.
She was right. We were barely a quarter of the way across the bridge. I retrieved the knife and wasted a few seconds checking the ambulance. Someone had already looted it. There was little inside but soiled bandages and the stretcher. I closed the doors, carefully, quietly, and followed Kim along the bridge.
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland Page 4
