Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  “We have to leave,” I said.

  “And it’ll have to be on foot,” Kim said.

  I wanted to swear but couldn’t even take out my frustration on my pack as we quietly sorted through the supplies we were going to take. On the whole, we were far better off than we’d been. We had clean clothes, a little more food, though we’ve no idea what’s in any of the cans. We had water, even some soap, matches and a couple of candles, the crowbar and tyre-iron. A map has been added to our compass. That leaves the Geiger counter, short-wave radio, and the ammunition taking up the rest of the space in our packs. We debated, mostly in mime, leaving the MP5 and its ammo behind in favour of another day’s worth of food, but we’re more likely to find more tins or wild cabbages than ammunition. There’s no way we’ll risk leaving the Geiger counter behind. Though there’s nothing we can do about radiation, and no reason to think we’ll find a hot-zone anywhere on the Irish mainland, it provides reassurance, something in precious short supply.

  Most of all, we’d had a good night’s sleep in the warm and dry. All things considered, it was no comparison to the miserable mornings we’d woken in the English wasteland, or the hellish nightmare of the tunnel on the Welsh border. The difference was that we were heading away from rescue.

  I was halfway down the ladder when I looked up and saw Kim’s face. I looked to the right, and saw what she’d seen. Twelve zombies were heading across the car park. I didn’t waste time wondering where they’d been hidden, I jumped the last few feet down to the bin, landing with a thump. I rolled down into the car park, making twice as much noise. It didn’t matter any more. The zombies were heading straight for us. I pulled the crowbar from my belt, as Kim jumped the last few feet.

  I set the pace and, before we reached the main road, it was clear we were easily outpacing the undead. We left the hotel, and took the direction that led to the town. Our plan was to find a quiet suburban road, assess whether we’d find more supplies in the town, or whether we were right and they’d all been gathered in the hotel. Beyond that, we’d look for bicycles, though we’d not discussed in what direction we’d ride them. That was the plan, and it lasted until the road curved and we saw the undead. There were at least a hundred.

  “You see it? The fleece?” I said, waving at the undead. They saw us. Arms were raised, though not in reply.

  “Later,” Kim said. “This way.”

  It was a direction picked at random, and took us down a narrow alley between a fish and chip shop and a tearoom. There was no way out at the end, only a wooden fence that split apart after five seconds’ work with the crowbar. Beyond lay a gravel car park, a one-storey building with an odd roof, and a trio of the undead.

  Kim took the left. I went to the right, swinging the crowbar low. Bone crunched as it smashed into the zombie’s leg. It fell and I ignored it, swinging the metal bar up and around, changing my grip, hacking at the next zombie’s head. The blow was a good one, but the creature’s arm got in the way. There was a crack as it broke the zombie’s wrist, but there was enough force to send it spinning sideways.

  “Bill!”

  Kim had felled the third zombie, and there wasn’t time to finish the other two. I followed her as the zombies staggered after us, out onto a road, and towards more undead.

  “I see it,” she said, before I could point it out. “I see the zombie in the fleece. Damn. Damn. Damn. You know what happened? All the zombies from Elysium walked right past the hotel. If we’d stayed there, they’d have kept going, heading north. We weren’t going to be trapped. We’d have been safe!”

  “We’re not now,” I said grabbing her arm, leading her across the road and into the garden of a two-storey cottage with flaking salmon-red paint. An arch of roses had been planted at the side. Grown wild, they overhung the trellis. Their thorns tore and snagged at skin and cloth as we pushed our way into the back garden. Three blows with the crowbar, and the fence was down. Another garden. Another fence. Another garden, but this time one with a low hedge and a view of fields. We kept going, across one field, and then the next, heading away from Kenmare. We didn’t slow until we heard cawing, followed by a black-feathered bird taking flight from a tree above us.

  “A crow?” Kim asked.

  “A raven, I think.”

  “Ah. So much for getting bicycles.”

  “They wouldn’t be much use now,” I said.

  The line of old trees either side of us thinned. The ground turned from mud to grass, and within half an hour we found ourselves on the green slopes of a shallow hill. We were utterly alone. It was a wonderful feeling. The sky was a blotchy pink. I know I’m meant to describe it as grey, but it wasn’t. The clouds were a faintly red wall stretching up beyond the rocky hillside. Behind us, I could even make out a vaguely blue patch over what I suppose must have been the sea. Far more quickly than it had arrived, the moment of tranquillity was shattered.

  “We didn’t leave a note for Sholto,” I said.

  “I did,” Kim said. “In the reception area of the hotel. I painted it on the desk.”

  “Oh. Thanks. What did you say?”

  “That we’d been there, and been forced to leave,” she said. “I said we’d make our own way back to Anglesey.”

  “Did you say where we were going?”

  “Where are we going?” she asked. “I mean, we’re going northeast but only because when you’re on the southwestern tip of an island, you haven’t much choice, but more precisely? If I’d named somewhere, and if Sholto finds the note, he’d come looking when he should be back on Anglesey looking after Annette and Daisy.”

  “He won’t have brought them with him,” I said. “Not to Ireland.”

  “I hope not, but do you think he could have stopped Annette from stowing away if she was determined? No, sending a boat to Elysium served more than one purpose. Having people risk their lives travelling after us, that doesn’t. And that brings us back to where we’re going.” Kim bent down, brushing the fronds of grass away from a small shrub with spindly leaves and delicate white flowers. “Do you know what this is?”

  “If this was a garden, I’d have said it was a weed,” I said.

  “That’s what we should do after this, when we get back,” she said. “Learn about the flowers, the seasons, the planet. It’s what’s important. It’s what we need to teach the girls.”

  “When we get back.”

  “Yes.” She straightened, and took out the compass. “We’re heading almost exactly northeast, and that’s wrong, isn’t it? We’re heading straight for…. what was the name of the place? The Killarney National Park.”

  I looked again at the mountainous peaks ahead of us. “Zombies head downhill, right? And a straight line takes us away from the undead.”

  That was as close to a route as we managed until we came to a narrow road. There were no signs in sight, but there was a car, one with a dead zombie hanging out of the back window. We followed the road until we reached a rutted track with the tyre marks of something heavy baked into the mud. The track led to an old stone cottage. A single word was daubed across the front in vivid red paint: Help.

  There was no gate to the property and no vehicle in the driveway, but nor were there any bodies or signs of a battle having been fought. I went to the door and knocked. There was a sound inside.

  “Hello?” I asked, surprised and momentarily elated. I heard furniture move. I crossed to the window, but it was blocked.

  “Hello?” I called, a little louder. There was the sound of wood falling against stone, and then of china breaking. Elation faded, and I didn’t need any imagination to picture the zombie stumbling about.

  “Only one, I think,” I said to Kim. “Can’t see it. We could leave it.”

  “We can’t,” Kim said. “Not really. Would you want to be left like that? No. Open the door.”

  It gave easily to the crowbar. I stepped back and out of the way. A moment later a zombie staggered through the doorway. Kim waited until it was out in the sunlight
. She fired. The zombie collapsed to the ground.

  “Dead in the fresh air,” Kim said. “It’s better than a tomb.”

  There was nothing useful inside the small cottage that we could salvage, but there was another word, painted on an interior wall in that same red paint.

  “Ifreann. That’s Elysium’s proper name,” I said.

  “No way that’s a coincidence,” Kim said. As she searched the shelves, I looked among the fractured crockery littering the floor. I found nothing and turned my attention to the solitary cupboard. Kim bent down, looking under the narrow cot built into an alcove near the fire.

  “Nothing here,” she said. “Wait, there’s a book, and something else. Balled up…. hang on.”

  She reached in with the tyre-iron, and hooked the items.

  “Looks like a t-shirt stained with blood,” Kim said. “Hang on. Look.” Gingerly, she unfolded a corner, exposing the left sleeve. “That’s a golden wave, right?”

  I glanced at the doorway and the zombie that lay dead outside. “Another one of Kempton’s people?” I opened the book. It was a guide to the footpaths in the Kerry hills, but at the back, someone had added a few words. Most of those were covered in mould, and I think that mould had been feeding on blood. There were a few that were still legible. “Escaped from… met Sorcha… on the… came south, because…”

  “That’s it?” Kim asked.

  “Not quite. There’s another line, repeated again and again.”

  “And? What’s it say?”

  “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” I read.

  “That’s from The Tempest, isn’t it?” Kim said.

  I looked at the word painted on the wall. “Whoever that woman was, she knew what Ifreann meant.”

  “Did she?” Kim asked. “Because if she came from Elysium, wouldn’t she have known the zombies were inside? Sorcha? Could that be Sorcha Locke, the woman Yolinda Day mentioned? Is it a common name in Ireland? Ah, who knows? What’s the point in trying to interpret any of this, it all happened so long ago.”

  Kim was right. There was no reason to linger. We left the cottage and returned to our routine of field, track, and road.

  We skirted the edge of the national forest. Any hope of finding bicycles, supplies, or a refuge in Killarney itself was dashed by the two dozen zombies squatting on the main road leading into it. We spent a minute behind the shelter of a thick fence watching the creatures, debating whether to kill them and hope the town was otherwise empty. From experience, we know that where there’s one, there’s usually more. We backtracked, heading east more than north, our route determined by where the ground was firmest. As such, I’m not sure precisely where we were when we found her.

  “Do you see them?” Kim whispered.

  “What?” The track was more pothole than path, and I’d been concentrating on not putting my feet into any of the foot-deep puddles. I looked up. Twenty yards ahead on the left was a five-bar gate. Through the gap it made in the alder and bramble hedge, I saw what Kim had. Under an ancient blackthorn tree were six graves, each marked with a crude cross.

  “A farmer’s family?” Kim whispered. “But where’s the farmhouse?”

  The gate into the field was old. The padlock wasn’t, but it had been cut. The grave markers gave no clue as to who was buried beneath. The crosses were made from two nailed-together lengths of broken pallet. There were no names.

  “Buried about two months ago,” Kim said. “Maybe three. It’s hard to tell. If this was your family, if it was me in the grave, wouldn’t you leave a name on the marker?”

  “That’s not something I want to think about, but yes, yes, I would.”

  “Because it’s a nice spot,” Kim said. “It’s a nice tree. You’d get the early morning sun, and the evening sunset behind those hills. I can see this being a place a farmer might come for a picnic. Probably kept horses in this field, brought them here in the morning, then left them to graze. The zombies came. You ate the animals, because what other choice did you have? More zombies came. Too many. So you dug the graves here, in a place that’s full of happy memories, but also because you want to keep the corpses far from your well or stream. And that,” she added, as she turned away, “is what we need to look for.”

  I watched her back for a moment, gave the graves another glance, then followed. “Something’s on your mind?”

  “No. Maybe. Sort of. It’s Oregon,” she said. “The family I stayed with on my year abroad. They had a field that was… okay, it was completely dissimilar to this. Different grasses. Different trees. I’ve been thinking about them a lot. I think it’s being surrounded by so much farmland. Or maybe it’s because Elysium’s the furthest west we’ll ever get.” She opened the gate. “They had maple trees. Five of them. It was the last of an optimistic grove. That’s what Jack called it.”

  “Jack was…”

  “Grandpa Jack,” Kim said. “That was his name, and his job description. He planted the grove after he got back from Vietnam. He’d served with this guy from Vermont and—” She shook her head, dismissing the memory. “Now’s not the time. Let’s find the farmhouse, find the well.”

  We continued along the track. I wanted to say that, after we got back to Anglesey, we could launch an expedition to Oregon, that perhaps they’d survived. I could say it, but that wouldn’t make it true.

  “There’s no blackberries,” Kim murmured.

  She was right. Brambles were intertwined with the ash and alder and other trees whose names I’ve never learned. The fruit had been picked.

  “Birds?” I suggested, as one took off from an oak tree marking the boundary with the next field.

  “Or whoever dug those,” she said, gesturing through an almost person-sized gap in the hedgerow. There were twelve graves in the field. Each had a marker, though this time they’d been dug in a rough line about ten feet from the field’s edge. “Can’t all be the farmer’s family.”

  “No. Perhaps it’s the neighbours?” I said. We didn’t go into the field to look for other clues as to the dead’s identity, but kept on for another hundred yards. The next field was empty. The one after that wasn’t. It was full of graves. The rows were erratic, one merging with another making counting their number difficult.

  “Over two hundred,” Kim said.

  I looked around, as if there might be a crashed plane that we’d somehow missed. There wasn’t.

  “Zombies?” I suggested. “Or refugees?”

  “Or both?” Kim said. “But why graves?”

  There was a low cawing from above. A raven flew above us, circling once before landing on a crude cross a dozen yards away. It cawed again.

  “Talk about omens,” Kim said. The raven gave a reply, and we took that as a sign we should move on.

  Kim changed her grip on the rifle. I checked the position of the oft-forgotten submachine gun on my back. Kim gave me a look.

  “Safety’s on,” I said.

  She nodded. “Why bury them? Why bury anyone?”

  “Under different circumstances, wouldn’t we have done the same?” I asked. “We sought a sanctuary, and kept looking until we found Anglesey, but what if we hadn’t?”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “We didn’t search for a sanctuary. You found me and we headed back to your Abbey. We found the girls, and after that, we became part of Sholto’s story, his quest for revenge.”

  “But if I’d not left the Abbey, if I’d not found you, I might have buried the dead,” I said.

  “No,” Kim said. “I don’t think so. You would have looked for survivors. You would have kept looking until you found them, or until you died. This, though, this isn’t where someone chose to make a stand. It’s where they decided they’d—” She stopped speaking and walking, and raised the rifle. Ahead of us, a bell softly jangled. It stopped. The ringing came again, and kept going, a discordant metallic tinkling that was unnervingly out of place.

  We found the bell another five hundreds yards, and two fields full of
graves, further on, at a point where the track crossed what was, technically, a road. It was barely wider than the track, and the surface was covered in two seasons of mud and leaves, but there were a pair of official signposts either side, warning motorists of passing farm traffic. On the other side of the miniature crossroads, with those signposts as anchors, was a wall of barbed wire. The bell was attached to the top. The reason it was ringing was the zombie caught in the razor-sharp barbs.

  Kim fired. The bullet slammed into the zombie’s skull. The creature slumped forward. The bell rung as the corpse settled. It went silent.

  “Okay,” I said, speaking to myself. “Now what?”

  “We wait,” Kim said. “Watch the left.”

  I watched. I listened. I heard a bird caw. Then another. I heard something moving through leaves. It came from the road. A minute later, a zombie shuffled along the muddy lane.

  “It’s wearing a uniform,” I said. “Military.”

  Kim raised the gun.

  I shook my head, and raised the crowbar. “Save the ammo.” I walked towards it, stopping twenty feet away, and let it come to me. I swung low, breaking its leg, and hopped back as it fell to the ground. It squirmed and thrashed until I stabbed the crowbar’s sharpened chisel-point into its brain. Around its neck, I found a set of tags.

  “He was Irish Army,” I said, walking back to Kim.

  “Oh.” She weighed that up and then shrugged. “Do you see the light?”

  “What? Where? Oh.”

  Taped to the road sign was a small, solar-powered security light rigged so that it would shine on the barbed wire. I’d missed it because I rarely look up these days. What’s there to see except clouds?