Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  “And the Aran Islands help with that?” I asked.

  “Of course. Think long term. Admiral Gunderson will return to the United States along with a good portion of her crew. No matter how far she gets, the ship will return, but not all the people will. I don’t mean they’ll die, I mean that some of them will stay there, they’ll create a refuge on… well, I don’t know where. Or maybe they’ll find some survivors who’ve already done that. Either way, not all the people will return, but the ship will.”

  “And you’re thinking about the oil they’ll waste if they have to go up to Svalbard to refuel? It’s about fifteen hundred miles, so about the same distance as from Ireland to Maine.”

  “No. I mean, yes, it would make sense to bring it south if we can find an oil tanker,” she said, “but I was really thinking about further in the future than that. The oil in Svalbard will run out. The power plant on Anglesey will stop working. We’ll use up the propellant in the satellites, and their orbits will decay until they burn up in the atmosphere. I don’t know which will happen first, or how long any of those will take, but it’ll be in our lifetime.”

  “I still don’t get the connection with the Aran Islands,” I said.

  “We’re only on Anglesey because of the power station. When we shut the nuclear plant down, people will spread out. If the zombies die, they’ll search for farmland in a better climate. If they don’t, and why should they die now? If the undead don’t die, people will simply disperse. They won’t all stay on Anglesey. Some will have settled in America. Others will go… who knows where? We need to stay in communication with them, wherever they are. That’s got to be by ship. Sailing ship. The shortest distance across the Atlantic would be by starting at the Aran Islands, or at least provisioning there.”

  “You’re not talking about the next few years, are you?”

  “I’m not even thinking about the next few decades. I’m thinking about the next century, and the one after that. If we can’t avoid a Dark Age, how do we minimise it? We can’t send a satellite into orbit; anything high-tech will be lost. Oil wells? Well, maybe we can drill them, but we can’t lay a new steel hull, not until people re-learn how to mine and cast iron. No, society will regress, but that doesn’t mean technology has to be forgotten, not if people are able to communicate. The alternative is having dozens of communities across the world, all developing at the same rate, all growing up with stories of the glorious old world. Stories will become legends. Legends will become myths. Myths will become religions. In a few hundred years, sailors and soldiers will set out across the Atlantic. It doesn’t matter from what side they depart, we know what happens next. History tells us that, and I don’t want a bloody, colonising conquest. No, if we’re not going to have a new Dark Age, if we don’t want to repeat history, that’s where it has to stay, as cautionary lessons taught to the next generation. The Aran Islands are closer to America than Anglesey. It’s a good stopping point. That’s why we need to investigate it. We can create the community there now while we still have the luxury of old world resources. I’m not saying that it’s the only answer, that moving a few dozen people here will mean no conquistadors in a few centuries’ time. I’m just saying that it might help.”

  “Can’t hurt,” I said, turning my eyes westward. “Bermuda.”

  “Hmm?”

  “That’s in the middle of the Atlantic. It’d be closer than the mainland.”

  “I always wanted to go to Bermuda,” Kim said. “I’ve always wanted to go to a lot of places.”

  “Maybe you still can.”

  19:00, The Aran Islands

  What a dismal sight. Dismal. Depressing. Dreary. Coming up with synonyms helps distract from the reality, which is that the only appropriate word is undead. According to the map, we’re off Inisheer, the most southeasterly of the three Islands of Aran. According to the instruments, we travelled twenty-five kilometres. According to the sun that’s dipping toward the horizon, it took nearly four hours. That’s not good time, and there’s not enough left to go ashore before nightfall. Not that we need to. Inisheer is full of the undead. There are hundreds of them.

  “It’s not just the zombies,” Kim said. “It’s the land. It’s the gravedigger, O’Reardon. Oh, I suppose we could dump the corpses in the sea but it… well, we would know they were there.”

  “It’s not the good news we were looking for,” I said.

  We powered the boat through the gap between the islands of Inisheer and Inishmaan. There were fewer zombies on the island to the northwest, but still more than we could easily deal with.

  I don’t know if it makes it worse or better, but we saw boats tied up at a jetty on Inisheer, and two sailing craft that had been dragged up a beach on Inishmaan. They’ve clearly been there for months. We’re a few hundred yards out into deep water, and we’ll spend the night here. According to the chart, the stretch of water separating the two islands is called Foul Sound. That seems darkly appropriate.

  We’re flashing a light at the shore, but I doubt we’ll get a response. Come dawn, we’ll head north, back towards the Irish mainland, to Malin Head, the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and then, hopefully, home.

  Chapter 10 - The Aran Islands & Connemara

  1st October, Day 203

  10:30, Inishmore, Aran Islands

  “People would have heard the engine,” Kim said. “The horses did.”

  “I think they’re ponies. Annette’s going to love hearing about them.”

  “She’s not a pony girl,” Kim said. “Or she wasn’t when we left.”

  After what we’d seen on the smaller two islands, we almost didn’t bring the boat to investigate Inishmore, the largest and most northwesterly of the Aran Islands. Curiosity won out. I don’t know whether I can say that hope triumphed, but I’m glad we came. There are at least six ponies on Inishmore. They must have been on the island before the outbreak. The ponies heard our engine, came to investigate, then ran when we stepped ashore. We weren’t going to catch them, nor was there any point trying.

  “They’ve survived this long,” I said. “They’ll last another few weeks.”

  “And they are marvellously good news,” Kim said. “Living animals. In some ways that’s better news than people. But are there people here?”

  The answer was no, and we found it in the first house we entered, and confirmed it in the second. There were cans of food on the shelves. We spent an hour going from cottage to cottage, looking for signs of the undead, but the only two we saw had their heads staved in a long time ago. I can’t be certain the horses did that, but I’m going to believe it’s the case.

  Whoever lived on the island fled, but they left the ponies behind. No one has been there since to loot it. Why, and why so many of the undead ended up on the two islands to the south, is a puzzle that will have to wait until we return. And we will return. Shannon, Aran, Elysium and who know where else, yes, we’ll return, but now we have to head north. We must reach the Irish coast and find somewhere safe to anchor for the night.

  22:00, Connemara

  It’s amazing how much difference a day can make. Not really a day at all, but just a few hours. I think, in a way, the journal is responsible. I can glance back at what I wrote before everything changed, and be reminded of the certainties to which I clung mere hours ago.

  We’ve anchored off what is either Finish Island, or Masson Island, but which probably isn’t Mweenish Island. The debate rages on, and probably will until dawn. As I’d never heard of the names before this evening, I’m staying out of the discussion. Instead, I’ll say that we’re off the Connemara coast of Ireland, about ten miles due north of the Aran Islands.

  This morning, Kim and I left those with more than a few backwards glances. I couldn’t help but wonder whether we were wrong about Inishmore and there might be a survivor there. The evidence of the untouched food, the lack of boats along the shoreline, and those boats on the zombie-infested islands of Inisheer and Inishmaan told me that the ponies are the
only residents. Even so… but we didn’t turn the ship around.

  “Why aren’t these islands on the chart?” Kim asked, as we eased around another empty bay.

  “It’s the Atlantic coast,” I said. “There’re islands everywhere.”

  “So why not include them? Who prints a map that only includes half the features? We’ll keep going for another hour, do you think?”

  Technically, sunset was still at least three hours away, but the clouds were growing thicker.

  “About that,” I said. “We can always shelter in one of these bays.”

  “I’d rather stop somewhere we know where we are. Somewhere with a road and a sign, or a house where we can look for a discarded letter. Oh, it’s absurd! I wish we had GPS. Do you think we’ll ever find out what happened to the other satellites?”

  I looked at the blank screens that took up half the control panel. “Probably not. I like CPO Watts’s theory that they were deliberately shut down so as to avoid destruction by hunter-killer satellites.”

  “A theory that only holds until you remember that Kempton’s satellites work just fine,” Kim said. “It’s too much of a coincidence for hers to be the only ones left in orbit.”

  Conversation moved back to a discussion of technology, how long it would last, and what future generations would do when it was gone. That, as it always did, segued into one on population growth, and the minimum size for a viable society. Conversation drifted into wishful prediction and doom-laden guesswork before settling into silence while we rounded a jutting spit of land.

  “Smoke!” Kim said. “Do you see it?”

  It was coming from twenty degrees west of north, and beyond the horizon.

  “Is it coming from land?” I asked.

  “Offshore, I think,” Kim said. “Were there oil platforms in this part of Ireland?”

  “I… I don’t think so,” I said.

  The boat slowly picked up speed as Kim steered towards the smoke. Land seemed to erupt out of the sea. The plume wasn’t from an oil rig, or a ship, but from a settlement on the mainland coast. My first impression was of trees. Then I saw a rooftop and a flash of sunlight off a glass window, but then the roof and window were obscured by the trees covering that section of headland.

  “Norwegian spruces,” I murmured. “I’m surprised Christmas trees grow here.” I would have thought that, so close to the Atlantic, the soil would have been too poor, but perhaps it was a case of being too poor for anything else.

  The farmed forest grew nearer, and details became clearer. There was an embankment between the farm and the shore, a shallow section of mostly sandy beach about ten metres wide. A wooden jetty stretched into the sea, but there were no boats tied to it. The sea breeze caught the smoke, and it billowed apart long enough for us to see a house close to the shore, another similar sized building behind it, and the roof of what might have been a barn behind that. The wind changed, the smoke returned, the buildings were lost to sight.

  “It’s a farmed forest,” I said. “And I think one of the farm buildings is on fire.”

  “No boats at the jetty,” Kim said. “I think the people already left. Set the fire first, you think? Maybe to cover their escape?”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “And perhaps they’re still there.” She slowed the boat, bringing it to a halt alongside the jetty.

  I was about to suggest we fire a shot to signal anyone who might be alive on shore when I heard a scream. Kim heard it, too. She grabbed the MP5, and jumped onto the jetty.

  “Tie her off,” she called, and had already started running before I could ask her to wait, but wait for what? I tied the boat, checked it was secure, then checked the weapons in my belt were the same. I had a knife and the pistol, but I’d replaced the crowbar with one of the cutlasses we’d taken from Kempton’s cabin on The New World. When I heard the crack of the submachine gun, I felt under-armed. A second of dithering, a memory of what a terrible shot I am, and I drew the cutlass and loped towards the smoke.

  The jetty joined the shore at a wall coated in broken plaster and more recent barbed wire. On the path was a waist-high wooden gate that had been reinforced to head-height with sheet metal supported by rough-hewn tree trunks. The gate was open. Had that been Kim? Or had it been left open during the exodus from this refuge. Gunfire came again, a sustained barrage of three shots, another three, then three more, over and over from somewhere ahead and to the right. The smoke obscured precisely from where. Then I heard the scream. Clear. High-pitched. Terrified. It came from my left.

  Beyond the gate was a yard filled with trucks and tractors, and even an old horse-drawn wooden caravan, though I couldn’t see any livestock. The sharp crack of the MP5 came from beyond the trees and smoke. The scream came again, this time more urgent, from the other side of the parked vehicles, and in the house closest to the sea. It was a two-storey farmhouse. Outside was a patch of mud and knocked-over beanpoles: a vegetable garden. The scream came again. This time I heard the word.

  “Help!”

  A child was at the window of the farmhouse, a girl around eight years old.

  “Help!”

  I picked my way across the churned mud. The front door of the cottage was open. I looked up. The girl was gone from the window. I looked back at the doorway. The interior was dark. The ground floor windows had been barricaded, but I knew what must be inside.

  I’d just reached the door when a zombie lurched around the side of the house. Fresh red blood stained a blue jumper. The woman’s left arm was split open to the bone, and hung limp by her side. She opened her blood-flecked mouth and snapped her teeth closed as her right arm shot forward. She shuffled another step. Her hand grasped. Her mouth snapped down. I stood, cutlass raised, waiting, though I’m not sure for what.

  Her name was Angela Kennedy. She was a primary school teacher from Cobh who’d been engaged to an engineer from Durham. They’d planned to move to Canada as soon as they were married. She liked tropical fish, Regency novels, and bitter chocolate. That’s what I learned later. At the time, she was just another one of the living dead.

  I lunged. I’m used to the straight spear-point of a pike. I forgot to compensate for the cutlass’s curved blade. The sword sliced along the undead woman’s face, scoring a line up her nose and across a forehead already splattered with blood. I turned the blade, cleaving a chunk of hair and flesh out of her scalp. I took a hurried step back, as I swung the cutlass up and hacked down. The sword slammed into her skull, forcing the zombie to her knees, but the blade hadn’t cut deeply enough. Her arm clawed out in a feeble swipe against my leg. I screamed, twisted, wrenched the sword free, and hacked again. This time, her skull split open in a spray of blood, brain, and bone.

  The gunfire continued, occasional and sporadic, interspersed with shouted voices. I couldn’t make out the words, though I heard the young girl clearly enough when she yelled “Help!” again. I went inside the dark house.

  The boards on the window blocked a lot of the light from outside, and that was already reduced by the growing cloud of smoke. My hand was halfway to my flashlight when I heard the tell-tale sigh of air being sucked into dead lungs. It was coming from ahead and above. Immediately opposite the door was the staircase, I stepped forward as my eyes went up, knowing what I’d see even before it came into view. A woman stood on the landing halfway up the stairs. About fifty, her golden hair was streaked with grey, her shirt streaked with blood.

  “Hey!” I barked.

  The zombie’s head jerked downward. It saw me. It lunged, and fell down the stairs. I jumped aside. The zombie landed hard, thrashing its arms and legs as it tried to right itself. I swung the sword down, stepped over the corpse, and climbed the stairs.

  There were three doors off the upper corridor. Sitting with his back against the furthest was a boy. His eyes were closed. There was a bite on his arm and too much blood on his clothes for that to be the only wound. I raised the sword, about to quickly finish him, when the shout came a
gain.

  “Help!” The cry came from the door to my right.

  “It’s okay. I’m here. Here to help,” I called back. “Open the door. We’ve got a boat.”

  There was the sound of furniture moving. I turned back to the undead boy, about to finish him when he gave a soft moan. Not a sigh. Not a rasp. Not any of the inhuman involuntary sounds the undead make. It was a very human moan, though it came from not-very-alive lips.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, dropping the sword. I knelt and searched for a pulse. I found one. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?” He clearly couldn’t. He was bleeding, and I’d nothing on me with which to bandage the wounds.

  Behind me, the door opened. A girl appeared.

  “Charlie!” she cried out.

  I picked the boy up. He was almost a dead weight, and he would be if I didn’t get him back to the boat.

  “Charlie!” the girl said.

  “My name’s Bill,” I said. “What’s yours? Look at me. What’s your name?”

  “Tamara.”

  “Okay, Tamara, stay behind me. I’ve a boat. We’ve bandages and a medical kit. We’ll get him there, and he’ll be okay. Stay close. When I say run, you run. To the shore. To the jetty. To the boat. Understand?”

  Before she could answer, there was another voice, this one from downstairs.