Kim pushed at the door. It swung inward. “Not a good sign.” She took out her torch, holding it flush against the assault rifle’s stock. I took out my own flashlight. Hoping an open door meant the undead had had plenty of time to leave, we went inside.
Immediately in front of the doors was a chest-high counter that looked far older than the school. Initials had been carved into the stained wood so deeply, and so long ago, that they’d been varnished over. Daylight through the doors behind me cast odd shadows in that ancient graffiti, but it barely pierced the gloom beyond. Though the counter was at least a century old, everything behind it was starkly modern. Computer, chairs, switchboard; all had gathered a thick layer of dust. So had the double-barrelled shotgun propped in an umbrella stand. It was a clearly a farmer’s tool, not a soldier’s weapon. When I broke it open, the sound filled the room.
“Empty?” Kim asked.
“Empty.”
Beyond the reception area were two doorways. One led up two steps to a carpeted corridor. The other doorway was wider, uncarpeted, and scuffed from the passage of generations of children’s feet. The doors themselves had been propped open by bags. Beyond lay a long, dark hallway lined with suitcases and holdalls, backpacks and handbags, even some paper sacks. A few had been opened, and it was no great leap to assume the rest contained a similar mixture of clothing and keepsakes.
“Definitely a refuge,” I said.
Kim nodded, but said nothing as she walked down the hallway, playing her torch on one door then the next. She stopped, her light shining through the door’s window. Inside the room, the desks had been stacked against the far wall. In the middle were five stretchers that I think had come straight from an ambulance. Each stretcher was occupied, though the corpses were covered with sheets. Each sheet had a dark stain approximately where the head would be.
I reached for the handle.
“No. Don’t,” Kim said. “Let them be.”
“What if they’re undead?”
She tapped the rifle’s barrel against the window. There was no movement inside.
“Dead,” she said. “Infected and killed. Or killed because they might have been infected.”
It set the tone for what we found in the rest of the school. The floor of the next classroom had been covered in sleeping bags. They’d been kicked and trampled aside in what had to have been a stampede to escape. Presumably that was around the time that the five patients had been shot. Evidence for that was found in the third classroom.
Like in the previous room, the pupils’ desks had been stacked by the window. The teacher’s desk was in the middle of the room, covered in a dark stain. The body of a uniformed police officer lay next to it. His throat had been ripped out. Next to his corpse were two zombies; both had been shot in the head. One was almost naked. The other wore a set of blue surgical scrubs. Medical instruments were scattered on the ground between them.
“They tried to save someone,” Kim said.
“And they failed.”
“But that’s when the panic started.”
“So this had to have been when they didn’t know what was really happening,” I said.
“Which could have been at any time,” Kim said. “When did we find out what was really going on?”
She had a point. “The officer’s still wearing his uniform,” I said. “So it had to have happened soon after the outbreak, before too many undead had been seen in this town. Back when he still thought there were laws to be upheld.”
“And whether that was a week or month after New York, we aren’t going to find out in this corridor,” Kim said, “but if they were using the school as a refuge, they would have had food and water. And if the infected were brought inside, and that made everyone flee, those supplies will still be here.”
“So will the undead,” I said.
Without another word, we moved apart. Our lights darted up and down the corridor. We could see nothing. We could hear nothing, but the doors were thick, designed to stop one unruly class from disrupting the others.
Abruptly, Kim stalked down the corridor. I don’t know if she’d heard something, but I hadn’t. I followed, sending the beam into each room we passed. They were empty, at least of the living and the undead.
Kim stopped at the point where the corridor branched. She shone her light on the ground, on something just out of sight. When I first caught sight of it, I thought it was a corpse. It wasn’t. It was two. A soldier lay with his body wrapped around the young girl he’d been shielding. She was only a little older than Daisy.
Kim walked away, along the corridor, shining her light on nothing. I went after her. The unanswerable ‘why’ that was in her eyes was in my mind, too.
“Check the school’s empty,” I finally said. “Then we should secure the doors.”
Kim sighed. “Yes.” She sighed again. Except, it wasn’t her.
Our hands shot up, torchlight dancing along the corridor. The sighing came again, muffled, but close. Step after cautious step, now listening as much as looking, we edged along the corridor. The sigh came again and this time was joined by a rattle, twenty feet ahead.
A pair of double doors shook. Another shotgun had been lodged through the handles, and that was all that was keeping the doors shut. I shone the light through the wire-mesh window of the right-hand door. An undead faced snarled back. I crossed to the left-hand door.
“It’s the assembly hall,” I said. “One zombie by the door, another four in the middle of the room, but coming this way.”
“Five? You sure?”
“Not positive, but that’s all I can see.”
“On three, pull the shotgun free,” she said. “Wait. Are they… are any of them children?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Fine. I’d just like one day when— Oh, hell. One. Two. Three.”
I dragged the shotgun from between the handles. The right-hand door flew open. The zombie staggered out, tripped, and fell to the ground. Kim fired. The creature went still.
“The doors! Your torch!” Kim snapped.
I’d tracked the zombie’s movements. When I returned the light to the doors, they were closed. A second passed. Then two.
“I’ll open—” I began. The doors flew apart, two zombies staggered through. This time, they kept their feet.
“You’re in the way! I can’t fire!” Kim snapped. “Get against the wall!”
There wasn’t time. I was still holding the shotgun. I swung it low, aiming for the zombies’ legs. The first went down. The second didn’t. That first impact had taken too much of the momentum. The gun thudded into the creature’s shin. It snarled. I dropped the gun, stepped back, and brought the light up as I dragged my crowbar free.
“Bill! Get against the wall!”
There still wasn’t time. The zombie was five feet away, staggering closer, almost falling. I rammed the crowbar up and forward, skewering the zombie through its open mouth. It lurched another half step, impaling itself further on the sharpened length of metal. I tugged, twisted, and tore the crowbar loose, ripping sinew and muscle, and the top of its head clean from its skull. The decapitated corpse fell.
“Bill?” Kim called.
The door was open. Propped open. I’d not realised, but another zombie had pushed its way through. Kim had shot it. Now it lay on the ground, dead, as was the zombie I’d knocked down.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine. You?”
“There’s one more,” she said.
I flexed my wrist as I brought the light up to shine through the open doorway. There was no movement. I didn’t want to wait, not any more. I wanted it over. I stalked into the room.
“Bill!”
I said nothing as I darted the light left and right. There was nothing. No movement. Just bodies.
“You counted wrong,” Kim said after she’d shone her own light across the assembly hall.
“I was sure there were five,” I said, heading to where I’d seen
them. There was a small cluster of bodies in the middle of the hall. Disfigured, dead. “Must have been immune.”
Kim checked the doors leading from the stage. “Locked. Sealed,” she said. “There’s only four.”
I shone the light into the corners, checking for myself, but she was right. Nothing moved in the room, and there was no other way out. “Only four,” I said. “Sorry.”
She shrugged. “Let’s check the rest of the building. Find the supplies. Find some new clothes, too.”
I looked down at my trousers, but I couldn’t distinguish between the undead gore and the mud.
We found the food store in the room immediately above the entrance.
“The staff common room, I suppose,” Kim said.
“Spacious,” I said, checking the windows above the canopy over the front entrance. They opened, and would give us an emergency escape if we needed it. We’d checked the classrooms, and found no more zombies. It hadn’t been a thorough search, and I still wasn’t convinced I’d counted wrong in the assembly hall.
“No view of the playground,” Kim said. “So no need for the teachers to see anything that would disturb their lunch.”
“Like what?” I asked. “What kind of school did you go to?”
She shrugged, and turned her attention to the supplies. “Tinned food. Bottled water still in its pallets. Must have come from a shop. Same with the cans. It’s variations on something in tomato sauce. Rodents didn’t get the labels. Odd. Wonder if that was because of the zombies. You want to light a fire?”
“Not really,” I said. “I can eat cold food.”
“And sit in the dark when night comes?”
I collapsed into a chair. “In a minute, then. We’ll need something we can set the fire in without burning down the building. It’ll wait.”
Kim sat opposite. “And we’ll need to seal the front door.”
“And check the back doors.”
“All so we can have a night’s rest.” She sighed, and stretched. “And we need to find you new clothes. Seriously, you do go through them.”
I tried to smile. She was trying to lighten the mood, but it was the wrong surroundings.
“You think the people were from this town?” she asked.
“Perhaps one of the soldiers was. Perhaps a group of them were. They left their base and came back. They tried to turn this school into a refuge. Gathered food from a warehouse. Gathered civilians from the homes. One of them was infected. The rest…” I shrugged.
“The rest fled,” Kim said. “And they didn’t drive those armoured personnel carriers away. Where did they go, that’s the question. A better one is where are we going?”
“I’d had an idea we could get to the coast, and if we could find a rowing boat, we could go back to Elysium,” I said. “If the zombies did follow us to Kenmare, the mansion would be empty.”
“Too many ifs,” Kim said. “And I’ll add another one, if we get there after Sholto’s been and gone, we’d be stuck in the house waiting for some new expedition to come for the turbines.”
“Too many ifs,” I echoed. “What does that leave? Belfast International?”
“The expedition to get the plane was meant to leave the day after we set out,” Kim said. “Even if they were delayed in departing, they’d have been and gone by now.”
“So we’re back to trying to reach the coast, and looking for a boat,” I said.
“Broadly speaking, yes,” Kim said. She reached for the map. It was one of the whole of Ireland, taken from the hotel. “If we go east we’ll end up between Cork and Dublin. We don’t want that, but there is somewhere else we could go. What was the name of the place on the embarkation list?”
“Pallaskenry.”
“That’s near Shannon Airport?”
“On the southern edge of the Estuary,” I said, pointing at a mostly blank space on the map where I thought Pallaskenry was.
“So about eighty kilometres from here?”
“Fifty miles? About that.”
“It’s a day’s cycling,” she said.
“But what will we find there?” I asked.
“We won’t know until we look, but we might find a sat-phone or… I don’t know, but it gives us somewhere to aim for, somewhere we’re more likely to find supplies than a random house.”
“And if we don’t find anything, or even if we do, where do we go then?”
“There’s the estuary, or the city of…” She peered at the map. “Limerick. We can look for a boat there. I know it’s not a great plan. Look at the map. Anglesey is only a few hundred miles away. A car ride and ferry journey and we could be back home with the girls.”
“A car ride, a ferry journey, and a time machine,” I said. I pushed myself to my feet and went to secure the doors.
Chapter 6 - Pallaskenry, County Limerick
27th September, Day 199
“About three inches deep,” Kim said dragging the wire free from the APC’s fuel tank. “The other armoured personnel carrier’s tank was empty, as were two of the lorries. The third contained about an inch.”
“Do you want to take a guess at the volume of the tanks?” I asked, picking up a shirt from one of the broken-open cases to wipe the crowbar clean. While Kim had been checking the vehicles’ fuel tanks, I’d killed the solitary zombie that had appeared outside the school during the night. It had been slowly drifting south, which gave some measure of hope the undead weren’t following us.
“I think there’s between two and five litres of fuel,” Kim said. “Imagine driving one of these APCs. We could cut straight across the fields for… twenty miles?”
“That sounds optimistic.”
“Maybe, but it would get us to…” She consulted the map, a more detailed one that we’d found in a geography supplies-room. “Well, not far. If we went west, we’d get to Tralee on the Atlantic coast. But the undead would follow the engine, and if we couldn’t find a boat…” She put the map away. “Pallaskenry it is. We’ll solve that last part of the mystery. Do you think we’ll ever drive again?”
“Tractors,” I said. “Electric cars around the island.”
“Until they rust,” she said. “This is it, isn’t it? This is the twilight of civilisation. What was it George said, that he didn’t want us entering a new Dark Age. We can’t stop it, Bill. In a few years, if not months, the oil from Svalbard will be gone. Do we try to open a well in Texas or Iran? By the time Daisy is grown, we won’t have any ships to bring it back. What about farmers to tap the rubber trees, and the factories to make tyres? No, this is it, Bill. This is the end of so much.”
“Usually, I’m the one who focuses on the worst,” I said.
“Oh, that’s not the worst,” Kim said. “Not by a long shot. It’s the school. It’s getting to me. Anyway, it puts Kempton into a whole new light.”
“It does?”
“Sure. She dreaded a nuclear war, right? That was what she was preparing for. Essentially that’s what happened, except for the zombies. Well, who could have predicted those? But Kempton got her planning wrong. She had her circuit-free Rolls-Royces in the garage, and the electric cars hidden away in the basement, safe from an EMP. But what use would they be when the fields have been washed onto the roads? She should have stored four-by-fours and tractors, and halftracks and… well, things like these APCs.”
“Didn’t you say there were some vehicles in the barn to which the tunnel led?” I asked.
“They were probably combines or threshers or other farm equipment,” Kim said. “I suppose if Kempton had prepared more thoroughly, the people in Elysium would still be alive, and we might have had to fight them.”
“Be grateful for small mercies, you mean? I don’t think you can get smaller than that. Pick a bike.”
The number of bicycles in the rack at the side of the school was testament to how quickly that refuge collapsed. It also suggests the school was abandoned at night, when a bike would have been a hindrance rather than a speedy escape. None ha
d evaded the onslaught of six months of weather, but a little oil from a lorry’s engine took care of the worst of the squeaking.
We’d both found it hard to sleep in a building whose ground floor was given over to so much death, and so had spent most of the night talking over and around our plans. I could justify them by saying that we were unlikely to find a boat in Tralee, but almost certain to find a seething mass of the undead in the east near Cork. In truth, we were both curious as to what we might find at Pallaskenry. I suppose there’s also truth in saying that we don’t know what we’ll find anywhere. That does make one direction almost as good as anywhere else. On reflection, I think we made the correct choice, simply because we managed close to sixty miles today, mostly thanks to the N21.
In Britain the motorways had been sealed with double chain-link and ten-foot-high crash barriers originally designed to protect overseas military compounds from suicide-bombers in speeding trucks. Ostensibly, those walls were meant to keep the undead out, though I suspect Quigley’s real goal was to keep the evacuees in. They’d succeeded in the latter, but failed in the former, turning motorways into cages filled with the undead. Vehicles fleeing after the evacuation had no choice but to take the English minor roads, and so those had become blocked as often as they were clear. In Britain, we’d had to resort to following the train lines, but trains always travel through towns, and those are always full of the undead. Ireland has fewer train lines, it has fewer roads, but those are very different to what we’d found in Britain.
It’s not that there weren’t any cars on the dual carriageway. Nor was it completely free of the undead, but obstacles and zombies were spread far enough apart that we could cycle through or around them. The greatest difficulty came from the hills. On foot, I’d noticed them surrounding us, but by bike it seemed like we were ascending four every hour, and, oddly, only ever going down half that number. It was an illusion caused by using muscles I’d not stretched in a month, but even so I was glad when Kim stopped at a crest. Below us the road drifted towards a town. The sign, about a hundred yards down the hill, told us Limerick was twenty kilometres away. It didn’t name the town that lay immediately ahead.
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland Page 8
