We gave a wide berth to the abandoned vehicles, conscious that the undead might lie underneath. We saw none until we were almost at the northern end, and that one was dead, crushed like those that lay in front of the ambulance.
“What could have done that?” I murmured.
Kim shrugged. “Something with tracks.”
“You think it was a tank?” I asked.
“More likely it was a bulldozer,” Kim said. “I guess that ambulance was following it.”
On the northern side of the bridge was a picnic spot with a view of the Atlantic. A dozen cars were parked nearby. They looked parked, not simply abandoned, and close enough together that I think they arrived at the same time. Otherwise, why stop a car so close to someone else’s when it could be simply dumped by the side of the road?
“Fuel cap’s open,” I said. The cars were empty of zombies, people, and belongings.
“They can’t have all run out of fuel at the same time. Maybe they pooled it to use in the bulldozer?”
“This tank’s petrol, not diesel,” I said.
Kim shrugged. The cars were hardly a propitious sign. Nor was the ruined house a little further north and to the east. A fire had ripped through the upper floors. Outside, lying in a rose bed and partially covered in white and pink petals, lay the charred remains of a person who’d jumped from the window above.
“The fall must have killed them,” I said. Certainly the fire had rid the poor soul of any clue as to their gender.
“Onward, ever onward,” Kim murmured, “because all hope lies at journey’s end—” Before she could finish, there was a soft crack of charred skin as the corpse’s arm straightened. I stepped forward, stamping my heel on the carbonised skull.
“It’s just the skin tightening,” I said. “That’s all. Doesn’t mean it was a zombie.” I don’t think Kim believed me. I didn’t believe me.
“Onward, ever onward,” she muttered, but said no more.
If there’s one word to describe the Bay View Hotel, it’s old-fashioned. Kim’s read that, and says that’s two words, but it fits. It’s not that the hotel is outdated, nor a modern design made to look antiquated. It’s that the owners found a style that worked a few decades ago and stuck with it. Kim’s read that, too, and says I’m romanticising the place because I’m wearing dry clothes and sitting by a warm fire. Perhaps she’s right.
The hotel is at the southern edge of the small town. The windows of the upper two floors of the three-storey building look out onto the bay from which it gets its name. We chose the Bay View rather than Kenmare Hotel, The Kenmare Bay Hotel, the Atlantic View Guesthouse, or any of the dozen other establishments listed on the over-full road sign, partly because it was the closest to the bridge, and partly because of the front entrance. It was sealed tight. Tyres had been stacked around the front doors, up to a height of five feet. Concrete had been poured inside, and spilled out around the gaps and the base. On the inside, something blocked all view of the lobby. Quite what, we couldn’t see from where we stood on the road. To the right of the main door, one of the ground floor windows had been smashed.
In the car park were five cars and one van that bore the name of a local butcher. The doors had been forced open. If there had been anything in the refrigerated rear, it had been taken. There was similar evidence that the cars had been searched, and that it had been done by someone who didn’t have the keys. Kim pointed at an open fuel cap as we passed, and then another; this one still had a length of plastic tubing inserted into the tank.
“No fuel container,” I murmured. “Must have had time to grab that.” I was searching for some glimmer of hope. Something positive that would dispel that air of foreboding. It couldn’t be done. It was obvious there were no living people in the hotel, and just as obvious that the ground floor window hadn’t broken itself. The culprit lay on a bed of broken glass just inside the room. Its skull had been split open, but even so, its withered flesh unmistakably belonged to one of the wretched infected.
“When was this?” Kim murmured, as much to herself as me. “They barricaded the hotel. They went out into the car park to gather fuel, but had to retreat back to the house, leaving the tube in that car. They took the fuel, though. That must have been soon after the outbreak. So when did they leave?”
“Soon after that, I reckon,” I said, knocking the glass free from the window. I climbed into the room, and over the corpse. Wincing as glass noisily crunched beneath my feet, I crossed to the door. The handle turned, the door didn’t move.
“Interesting. They must have sealed it after the zombie got in, so they stayed here for a few hours,” I said.
“Maybe until dawn? They must have driven away.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because it had to be zombies that made them rush inside, leaving that tube in the fuel tank. There’re no dead zombies out here. They didn’t fight, so the undead followed them when they escaped.”
“Over the bridge, maybe?” I said.
“In that bulldozer? Maybe. Maybe not. Come on, if that door’s sealed, they didn’t leave by it, so let’s find out how they got out, and then we can get in, and maybe get into some dry clothes.”
We found our way in above a pair of double doors that had been blocked by a pair of blue industrial bins. From the top of one, a ladder led to an open window.
“Zombies can’t climb ladders,” I said, and pulled myself up onto the bin.
The open window led into a small office. Rain had got in through the window, aiding the growth of green mould on an ancient desktop computer. There wasn’t much else in the room: a battered filing cabinet; a wall-map of Ireland; a flat-pack desk; a swivel chair covered in a crocheted blanket that had been red and white but which was now a similar shade as the green mould on the computer. The small room had one door, which opened onto a corridor. Three more closed doors led off it, with a set of fire doors at the end.
The first door led to a room filled with hundreds of balls of wool, some in boxes, some in bags. The second door contained a stockpile of fishing rods, nets, lures, and a couple of lobster traps. We opened the third door to a barrage of conflicting aromas coming from box upon box of scented candles.
“Stockpiling what they couldn’t immediately use,” Kim said. “Probably emptied the shops in town.”
We pushed open the fire doors and were struck by the smell. The heavy doors had kept out the worst of it; the candles had masked the rest. It was damp, dank, decay.
“Zombies? Or corpses?” I asked.
“Yes,” Kim said.
We found the bodies in the restaurant. There were four of them. One lay by the doors, her stomach ripped open. She’d been someone who was immune, killed by the undead. Two more bodies lay a short way from her, their skulls crushed. The fourth wasn’t a corpse.
A woman sat at a table in the middle of the restaurant, her back to us. On the table were an empty glass, a hunting knife, and a closed book. At first, I thought she was dead, but when a floorboard creaked under my foot, her shoulders moved.
“Hello?” I asked, stepping forward, checking that there truly were no more undead in the room.
The woman’s head tilted to the left.
“Hi. Hello,” I said, and was at a loss for what else to say.
The woman unfolded, standing up, and there was something in her movements that told me she wasn’t going to answer. She wasn’t going to speak. She wasn’t alive. Not anymore. She banged into the table, staggered back, and knocked over the chair as she turned around. I saw those blank eyes, the bloodstained shirt, and knew. Kim fired a single shot. The zombie crumpled to the ground.
“I’ve never seen one sitting down before,” I said.
“How many have you seen?” Kim asked. “How many have I seen? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Statistically speaking, if you put ten thousand zombies in close proximity to a chair, one of them will end up sitting on it.” She walked over to the corpse. “In this case, I’d say she was bi
tten, and sat down to write a note. Can’t tell what she wrote, though. She bled over the paper. But if she was just sitting here, then she had to be the last one alive, the last one to turn. So the rest of the hotel is probably empty.”
“Probably,” I said.
It took another two hours before we’d confirmed it.
“So what do you think happened here?” Kim asked as we watched the flames lick around the saucepan. The reading-room fireplace was the only one in the hotel with a layer of ash in the grate. From that, we assume it was the only chimney that still worked. There was plenty of wood to burn, all neatly stacked next to the hearth.
“I think,” I said, “that the people who took refuge here came from the town. That after news of the outbreak, some locals fled to family or friends in farms or other, more easily defensible properties. Those with boats, or who knew people with boats, they went out to sea. The rest took shelter here.”
“Going by the kitchens, I think there were about thirty of them,” Kim said. “I guess some of them might have arrived from nearby villages. They found the town empty, saw the smoke from the chimney, and came to the hotel.”
“Maybe. The dirty crockery in the kitchen tells us they left quickly.”
“The zombies tell us that,” Kim said. “But the undead came at night, because there was time for the people to pack. Rather, they didn’t want to leave immediately. They took as much as they could carry, and that was mostly food. They left at dawn.”
“That tubing left in the fuel tank tells us they had a plan, but that something went wrong.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Someone was bitten. Infected. That explains the dead zombies.” We’d found three more in the ground floor corridor outside the bedroom with the broken window. Not only had the door to that room been barricaded, so had the corridor itself.
Kim picked up a tea towel, and took the saucepan off the heat. She decanted some into a china teapot with a hand-painted design of the bay. It was so artfully accurate, I’d have recognised it as the view from the hotel even if there hadn’t been twenty identical teapots stored behind the reception desk, ready to be sold to departing guests.
“I think the water containers came from a boat,” I said. We’d found eight of them in the kitchen. Each made of blue plastic, and ten gallons in volume.
“Makes sense,” Kim said. “Someone had to have collected all that fishing gear in the upstairs room. Had to have been a fisher, but one without a boat, which brings us back to the key question: when did it happen, and where did they go?”
“They collected cutlery and crockery from the town,” I said. “There’s so much of a similar pattern that it must have come from restaurants, not from people’s homes. That means there was time to collect it after people had fled the town.”
“They would have waited a few days before they began looting,” Kim said. “Because when they began taking from their absent neighbours, they’d be acknowledging that law and order had irretrievably broken down. Do you think they knew about the nuclear war?” She raised the digital watch she’d found in one of the rooms. “This still works, so there was no electromagnetic pulse here. Maybe they didn’t know about the bombs.”
“They’d have had radio,” I said. “Perhaps they heard something.”
“Like what? From who? And that’s the problem. It’s all speculation. Do you want to pick a can?”
Cutlery and candles weren’t the only supplies the hotel’s occupants had stockpiled. We’d found a room that contained nothing but tools, most of which had edges sharpened to a point. I’d taken a crowbar, Kim a shorter tyre-iron. It was the other room that was the disappointment. It had been the food store. It was difficult to know how much food the fleeing survivors had left behind. Anything in packets had been shredded by rodents, as had the labels on the cans.
I opened a can. “Fruit salad,” I said.
“Brilliant. That’ll take away the taste of that cabbage.” There was still half a saucepan left of the cabbages we’d picked in that field. We’d shredded the vegetable, doused it with pepper, turmeric, and vinegar. Even then it tasted like old boots.
“Any lychees?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, dividing the fruit into two bowls. “Grapes, melon, possibly mango. Ah, a cherry. Bon appétit.”
“I miss lychees,” she said. “We always had them at Christmas. The flavour was weird, the texture even worse, but it was a tradition, a—” She stopped, and I didn’t press. Silence reigned for a brief few minutes.
“It’s the ambulance,” Kim said, pushing her empty bowl aside. “That’s when it started. From the bandages, someone injured was in the back. Someone infected. They turned. The ambulance stopped. The driver fled. I bet other cars came. They wanted to get onto the peninsula. Maybe even to Elysium. The ambulance stopped them. Each time, a new car was added to the blockage. Maybe that’s why they were syphoning fuel from the vehicles in the car park, the people here wanted to get the traffic off the bridge. Either way, people kept arriving. The engines would have brought the undead.”
“And this has to be one of the more remote corners of Ireland,” I said. “It doesn’t speak well for what we might find elsewhere. But it wasn’t the ambulance that began it. It was whatever heavy drove over the bridge, crushing those bodies. That was first, the ambulance second. But I think you’re right. Too many people came because all they knew about this bay and the peninsula was that it was remote. There were no reported outbreaks in the United Kingdom and Ireland,” I murmured. “That’s what they broadcast on the BBC. Didn’t Yolinda Day’s note say something about the BBC being broadcast over RTE’s frequency?”
“RTE was Ireland’s national broadcaster, right?” Kim asked. “Why would they do that? Why would Quigley want it broadcast in Ireland?”
“To keep the north calm? Because a lot of people in Britain had relatives in Ireland, north and south? Because Quigley didn’t want people fleeing across the Irish Sea? Or perhaps he didn’t think that far ahead. They were broadcasting the message on all frequencies. I bet they boosted the signal strength so that it would drown out any local and dissenting voices. Or perhaps it was a slip, an error, an accident for which there’s no explanation.”
“Right. No point dwelling on it,” she said. “It was about a month after the outbreak when they left this hotel. If you’re right, if people came here because they thought it so remote it would be safe from the undead, then I think that tells us everything we need to know about what we’ll find in the rest of Ireland. And isn’t that a cheery thought.” She picked up another label-less can. “I’d say there’s enough food for six days, and more than enough water.”
“More than enough firewood, if you count the furniture,” I said.
“Do you think Sholto will find us here?”
“I think so,” I said. “It’s just a matter of when that’ll be. If he comes, he’ll come with people. They’ll see the sunken boat. I don’t know if they’ll see Will and Lilith’s bodies, but they’ll find Simon’s when they go into Elysium. They’ll look for us. They’ll find the undead corpses on the road. They’ll find the bungalow, and Rob’s body, but not ours. He’ll keep looking, and if he follows the coast, he should see the smoke.”
“So you agree? We’ll stay here for a few days?”
“Until the food runs low,” I said.
“Good. I know you like to say that we’re the help that comes to others, but I think, just this once, we’ll be the ones to whom help comes.”
Chapter 4 - Somewhere North of Killarney
25th September, Day 197
What is it they say about the best-laid plans?
“Bill! Bill!” Kim hissed, her voice laced with urgency.
I opened my eyes and found she was already dressed.
“What?” I asked.
“Shh! Zombies. Outside.”
We’d forgotten they’d been following us from Elysium. The embankments had kept most on the roads, and all those roads led to t
he bridge.
Less than a minute after waking, I was peering through a gap in the curtains, holding the optical scope to my sleep-filled eye. I counted twenty zombies on the bridge itself, and another thirteen on the southern side. Assuming the ambulance and other vehicles hid some from view, there were at least forty that we’d have to deal with. It was a manageable number. That’s what I thought, but I was still half asleep. I hadn’t realised the full extent of our problem.
“Look down,” Kim said.
There were zombies in the hotel’s car park.
I backed away from the window, and followed Kim into the hall. Even with the door closed, we kept our voices low.
“There’s about fifteen immediately outside,” Kim said.
“And forty on the bridge?”
“About that,” she said.
“Fifty-five? Call it sixty. You can shoot them, then we….” We could what? As the fog of sleep cleared, that terrified desire for immediate action was replaced with the sanguine calm that Kim had already reached.
“What I don’t know,” she said, “is how many are in the town. I saw five disappear behind that row of houses to the north, and it isn’t like they waited until dawn before they crossed the bridge. There will be more in the town. If we start shooting, they’ll head here. We’ll be trapped. If Sholto doesn’t come, we’ll be dead.”
“If you started by shooting the zombies on the far side of the bridge, we could put up a barrier—” I began.
“We couldn’t, Bill. If there was an easy way of blocking that bridge, wouldn’t the people who took refuge here have done it?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.” I glanced at the door to the closed room, imagining the undead streaming past during the night. They might not have done. What we saw might be the extent of their numbers: five in the town, fifteen outside, forty on the bridge. Once those few dozen were dead, we could wait for rescue and be back on Anglesey within the week. Or dozens might become hundreds, then the full thousand that had been trapped inside the walls of Elysium. They’d be joined by hundreds more from the countryside. We’d be surrounded by a small horde that would only grow larger. The hotel’s walls were thin. It wouldn’t take half their number to batter a way through brick and stone.
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland Page 5
