We found our way in via a skylight positioned on the roof a few feet from the front door. The glass was tinted, with a blind drawn on the inside, so we couldn’t see what lay below. The weak point was the join where the metal frame met the wooden beams. It took five minutes of wince-inducing heaving, pulling, and occasionally smashing to get it free.
“Can’t see any zombies coming,” Kim said. “But we need to be quick. That was too noisy.”
I lowered myself down into a narrow, dark hallway, off which were four closed doors. I tapped one, listened. Nothing. I tried the handle. The door swung open soundlessly. Beyond was a room that was empty of people, zombies, and furniture. I tried the one opposite. It was the same, except for a solitary, and empty, sleeping bag. I took eight steps away from the front entrance to the other two doors. One led to a third empty room, the other to a smaller corridor with three more doors. This was the part of the bungalow that had been lived in. There was a small kitchen, a small bathroom, and a small bedroom.
There was a thud behind me, I raised the crowbar, but it was only Kim
“You’re being too slow. What have you found?”
“Not much.”
“Then look faster.”
“We got it the wrong way round,” Kim said, five minutes later. “Embarkation?” She waved the tyre-iron towards the room with the single, unrolled sleeping bag. “People came here in preparation to embark for somewhere else. Except they didn’t come, did they? I mean, one person did, but the rest were still at Elysium.”
There were thirty-eight other sleeping bags, each neatly compressed into a roll eight-inches in diameter, ten inches long, and hidden beneath a panel under the wardrobe. The panel had been removed, otherwise we’d never have noticed it.
The bungalow had had a live-in guardian while a long-running dispute with the planning authorities was slowly playing out. That was the story the paperwork told, and the paperwork was extensive. It filled three binders that could easily be shown to any neighbour who came to ask when the eyesore of a property would be decorated. It was all cover, of course.
“It doesn’t explain why,” I said. “Why here. Why not somewhere more remote? I suppose you’re right, the bare concrete is meant for a helicopter, but that doesn’t explain why they’d come here. What’s special about the place?”
“Nothing,” Kim said, opening one of the bedroom’s small dresser’s drawers. “The guardian was a man. I suppose that rules out Rachel.”
“Does it rule in Markus?” I asked. “Probably not. They left their phone. I suppose that’s not unusual.”
“We’re missing something, Bill,” Kim said, walking into the kitchen. “Something important.” She pointed at the table. “Two mugs. Two plates in the sink. One sleeping bag in an empty room. Someone came here. The caretaker left with them the next morning. One person. Only one.”
I opened a cupboard and found packets of spaghetti inside. The house was so well sealed that no rodents had found a way in. I picked up a tin with an intact label. We’d know what we were going to eat before opening a can. It was like finding treasure. Better than treasure.
Kim sat in the kitchen’s only chair. “A solitary life for a solitary caretaker expecting thirty-nine people to come here and be airlifted… where? Why? Embark for where? After the outbreak, the guardian stayed here until one person arrived. Only one. They decided this place wasn’t safe, so they left, and left the rest of the food behind. I suppose they might have gone south to Elysium, but maybe they didn’t. Embarkation? Maybe they embarked, but for where? Do you think a helicopter came?”
“No idea,” I said, sealing my pack and then hers. “And I’m ready to go.”
“You are?”
“You aren’t? A minute ago, you wanted me to hurry. We’ve got as much food as we can carry, and now we need to find somewhere safe to cook it.”
“Hang on, we’re missing something.” She stood, opened a cupboard, and took out a box of tea.
“We’ve got tea,” I said. “And we’ll find more.”
“I know. It’s not the tea. The sleeping bags were hidden in a compartment built into the floor under the wardrobe.”
“So?”
“So what if there are other compartments? Other hideaways? In here, behind a cupboard?” She turned a full circle. “No. The bathroom. Remember in Elysium,” she said as she left the room. “The hidden chamber up in the attic where the guns and ammo were stored? That was near the water tank, presumably because the pipes would have confused a metal detector.”
I followed her into the bathroom. She gave the plastic panel surrounding the bath a kick.
“Yes.” She slammed the tyre-iron into it. The plastic cracked. Another blow, and she was able to lever away a large enough section that we could see inside. Dust and dirt lay undisturbed on a thick section of concrete.
“And now we really are out of time,” she said.
As I turned away, I saw it. Behind the toilet, one of the tiles was attached with a screw. Only one tile. The rest were cemented into place. I knelt down, and spotted a small cap, the size of the screw-head, the colour of the tile. It took a minute to get the screw loose. Four tiles concealed an alcove behind the toilet. In it was a row of black durable briefcases. We took them out. There were ten in total. Two cases were empty. The others each contained a compact version of the MP5 that I’ve been lugging around since we left Elysium. What they were missing was ammunition. There was a space in each case for two magazines.
“Two missing guns,” Kim said. “And a lot of missing ammunition. They didn’t even leave a note. You’d think they’d leave a message for the other thirty-eight. Unless… unless whoever got here knew no one else was going to come. What was it Yolinda Day wrote? That Sorcha Locke and some others went to the garage. We thought those were the zombies you killed. What if they weren’t? What if those zombies were already there? What if Sorcha Locke and the others left Elysium? One died in that house with Help painted on the wall. The gravedigger, O’Reardon, was another. A third, the last, made it here.”
“And maybe a helicopter came,” I said. “And maybe they did embark for somewhere. Wherever it is, we’re not going to find out, but we can’t stay here tonight.”
We left the bungalow, but haven’t gone far. We’re in a house about a kilometre to the north. It was empty, there’s a fireplace. There’s not much more to say. We’ll stay tonight, and go on tomorrow. I’m not sure where. I don’t know what we were expecting from Pallaskenry, except we didn’t find it.
Chapter 7 - The Shannon Estuary, County Limerick
28th September, Day 200
“There are fewer zombies,” Kim said, easing the pack off her shoulders.
“In Ireland? I suppose so,” I said, as we paused to take in the view from the hill’s crest. “It makes, sense, doesn’t it? It was a less densely populated island than Britain.”
“No, I mean less than we’d expect even after taking that into account. Compared to when we were getting out of London, or walking through Wales. God, do you remember how terrifying that was, when Daisy was sick? Anyway, I mean it’s been two hours since we left that house, and we’ve seen a grand total of four of them.”
“I haven’t been counting,” I said. “And there were too many to count yesterday.”
“But that was mostly in one place,” she said. “Even so, it was a lot less than we saw in one place back in England. Maybe it is because Ireland was less densely populated. What that means is that we should consider trekking due east.”
“Rather than following the coast?” I asked.
“Water isn’t a problem,” Kim said, “not with the rain, the rivers, the streams. Not as long as we can find somewhere sheltered to boil it, and there are plenty of houses for that. Food is the real issue. We’ve been lucky so far with that hotel in Kenmare, and then Pallaskenry, but that luck has come from having looked. If we find a boat and follow the coast, we can only search houses close to the shore. If we’re on foot, we’ll pass
hundreds of properties each day. If we’re on bikes, we’ll pass thousands, and be at the east coast before the food we’re carrying has run out.”
“Assuming we don’t abandon the bikes,” I said. “We’ve had to do that already.”
“Sure, but we’re more likely to find new bikes than a new boat, assuming we find one in the first place. And if we have to abandon the boat somewhere further up the coast, we won’t actually be closer to home.”
“Even if we cycled to the east coast, we’d only be closer in the geographical sense,” I said.
“Isn’t that the only one that matters?”
“I meant we’d still need to find a boat, and that might—”
“I know what you meant,” she said. “We need to think about our plan, that’s all. But we need to think quickly. The Shannon Estuary is close.” I looked around for a signpost. “The sea, Bill,” she said. “Can’t you smell it?”
I took her word for it.
To call it a plan is far too generous. Anglesey is roughly due east of Dublin, but the satellite images of the coast south of Dublin showed nothing but ruins and the undead. I wanted to follow the coast until we found a boat, and then make our way slowly around to the Irish Sea. Well, no, what I wanted was to go from dawn to dusk without worrying about zombies lurking behind every hedgerow. I missed Anglesey, the children, and the uneventful life we lived there.
“I guess it’ll depend on whether we find a boat,” I said. “Or where we find a boat. If we have to walk twenty kilometres to Limerick to cross the estuary at a bridge, maybe it would be worth cutting due east.”
A seagull landed on the roof of a rusting red hatchback. It was the first car we’d seen in half a mile, but it was the beginning of a long line of abandoned traffic. A hundred yards on was a blue coupé, then a white van, then a bumper-to-bumper line of trucks and tankers, cabs, cars, coaches, and at least one example of anything else that had wheels and an engine. What they all had in common were the skeletons inside.
“What happened?” Kim said, asking the question I was thinking. She stopped by a bus whose last destination was Ennis. The door was closed, but inside were bones. I don’t know if it would have been better if the skeletons had been sitting in their seats, but they weren’t. The bones had been picked clean, and lay scattered about the aisle. Short of counting the skulls, it was impossible to tell how many had been aboard. There was a flurry of movement, a flash of white, and a seagull erupted from behind a seat and flew up through a broken skylight. That gave the shape of what had happened to the bodies. Other animals must have found their way in and feasted on the flesh. Of course, it gave no answer to what had killed the bus’s passengers.
The next car was sealed tight, the bodies of a family inside preserved as if they were in a tomb. The next had a broken windscreen, the corpses again ravaged by wildlife. Beyond that, a trio of birds took off from the back of a flatbed truck still half full of scaffolding.
“What happened?” Kim asked again. “So many people. So—” She stopped. Dropped her pack. Rummaged inside until she found the Geiger counter. She stared at the screen. “Nothing. Normal. Low, even. Do you think the radiation would have dissipated?”
“I think so. Would animals eat irradiated flesh? I don’t know.” It was hard to think clearly as we weaved our way between the stalled traffic, avoiding the gnawed bones that lay scattered between the deflated tyres and broken glass.
“Something did this,” Kim said. “People don’t just die. I mean, they do, but they wouldn’t sit in their cars waiting for death.”
She had a point. “All these people came here for a reason,” I said, using the words to conjure the image in my mind. “Except this wasn’t their final destination. They were trying to reach somewhere else. Somewhere along the coast. Where? Limerick, perhaps? Why?”
“Looks like they packed clothes,” Kim said. “Food as well.” She reached through a broken window and picked up a map from the passenger seat. “Can’t read it,” she said. “Too much rain.” She walked towards the next car. There was a crunch of bone underfoot, and something odd about the sound. It hadn’t come from Kim or me.
“Kim!” I called, diving forward as a zombie stumbled through the gap between the vehicles. Kim turned as my shoulder hit the creature. It and I fell in a heap as Kim leaped out of the way. The zombie’s mouth snapped as I pushed and kicked, and tried to get free. I heard Kim swear, and hoped it was in frustration and not pain. I slammed my elbow into the zombie’s side. Its ribs cracked. It didn’t stop thrashing. We rolled over, and it managed to get on top. I lashed out with my left hand while my right went to my belt. I was trying to reach my knife, but found the butt of the MP5. The weapon had been nothing but a burden since we left Elysium. I grabbed, twisted, and turned it so the barrel was pressed against the zombie’s flesh. I pulled the trigger. It was set to fully automatic. I emptied the entire magazine into the creature. At least one bullet found its brain. It collapsed. I pushed the dank, dripping remains off me, and pulled myself up.
Kim was on her knees, fending off two zombies with the tyre-iron, the SA80 on the ground by her feet. I ran forward, swinging the submachine gun like a club. I knocked one onto the bonnet of a panel van. Another swing, and the second was pitched to the ground. Kim grabbed her rifle as I grabbed her arm and hauled her up.
Wordlessly, we ran. The narrow confines between the stalled traffic made my loping limp as fast as Kim’s sprint. After five hundred yards, Kim clambered up onto the roof of a rusting coach.
“Damn.”
“They following?” I asked.
“No. I mean yes, but they’re not close. I lost my pack.”
I hadn’t realised. “What was in it?”
“The Geiger counter. Some food. Water. The shortwave radio.”
I weighed that up. The radio was the only significant loss. As it worked on line of sight, its effective range was only a few miles. “We’ll find another radio,” I said. “All decent-sized boats had one.”
“I’m more worried about the Geiger counter,” Kim said. She jumped down. “It looks clear ahead. I think the zombies were in that field. It must have been our talking that woke them.”
“The sound of the gun would have woken the rest,” I said.
“Good point.” Her hands went to her pockets, then to the pouched belt. “Still got most of the ammunition. We’ll have to stop and count it. Later.”
“You said it looks clear ahead?”
“Yes, but the road behind looked clear before we were attacked.”
We walked quietly, more cautiously, but a little more quickly. When we reached a junction, the smaller country road was just as full of cars, and again, they were full of skeletons.
“There’s a lookout point,” Kim murmured, pointing at the sign. “What do you think?”
“Honestly? I think it was a chemical weapon,” I said. “These people were all killed at the same time. If it had been a nuclear blast, perhaps a neutron bomb, then the windows would have been blown out. Some haven’t, which suggests that what killed them wasn’t an explosive weapon. I do remember that Britain trialled chemical weapons on the undead. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was so dosed on painkillers, I didn’t think of much except myself. If I recall, there was a plane—”
“A plane from America,” Kim cut in. “A USAF colonel who flew himself and some of his men across the Atlantic. Someone on board was infected. Quigley used the plane as an experiment to see what chemical weapons worked. You wrote it in your journal,” she added. “I remember that because of what you wrote next, that the experiment was in case there was an outbreak inside a school. When I asked what you thought, I meant do you think we should go up to the lookout point? It’s the path up there, beyond the car park.”
Vehicles had stopped there. I think some might have been trying to turn around. After this long, there’s little point trying to work out the stories of so many individual drivers, not when the collective story of the corpses is so c
lear.
The lookout point had a trio of benches overlooking the estuary, a pair of picnic tables, and twice as many litter bins. There was a telescope, which required a coin, not that we needed it to see what lay before us.
“The estuary’s wider than I thought,” Kim said.
I took out the map and compared it to the embossed steel plaque that showed the various points of interest visible from the spot.
“Shannon Airport’s somewhere over there,” I said pointing across the wide expanse of water. “We’re further west than I thought. In fact, I think we’re west of Pallaskenry.”
“Which means we took the wrong road at some point,” Kim said. “But we can’t say we’re lost, not if that’s the estuary. I can’t see any boats. There’s a lot of floating wreckage, but nothing I’d call seaworthy. Nothing I’d even call a hull.”
“What about those,” I said, pointing at an inlet about a mile to the east where three steel-grey ships floated perilously close to a near-sheer cliff wall. “They look military, don’t they?”
“How would we get down to them?” Kim asked. “Besides, I bet they have zombies on board.”
“Zombies on ships?”
“Of course. Don’t you remember me telling you about Svalbard? That’s how the zombies kept getting onto the island. The infected were inside.”
“I thought that was only in the early days of the outbreak.”
“The most recent time they told us about was in June,” Kim said. “It’s something to do with tidal patterns, that’s why they keep drifting ashore on that archipelago. It’s not as bad as it sounds, not unless a boat actually runs aground somewhere shallow enough for a zombie to fall over the side and then walk ashore.”
“Of course.” And I did know it. Boats and planes. That was how the outbreak had spread.
“I can’t see a way down that cliff,” Kim said. “Anyway, those ships probably won’t have fuel. What does that leave? Keep going east until we reach Limerick, I suppose. Maybe look for some bikes.” She headed back to the road. “You really think this was done by a chemical weapon?”
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland Page 10
