“Let go!” he stormed as I pushed him behind Kallie.
“There’s too many,” I said. Kim and Kallie were firing quickly, perhaps too quickly. There were at least twenty zombies less than eighteen yards away. An arrow hit a chest. A bullet hit a head, but the next shot missed.
“The alley! Let them come to us! The alley!” I yelled again.
“Yep,” Kim said calmly. “Back up, Kallie.”
Kallie loosed an arrow, and backed towards the alleyway that ran along the side of the house. She had only taken four steps when the fence broke. Wood splintered as a pair of undead fell into the garden and onto Kallie. She was knocked down, but kept thrashing and kicking, punching and pushing just as violently as the two zombies on top of her. Dean dived forward, stabbing his knife at the closest of the undead creatures. I drew my own, plunging it into the skull of the second.
“Bill, quick!” Kim called. Another dozen zombies were pushing their way through the neighbouring back garden. We were surrounded.
“The house! Inside!” I yelled. We only had seconds, but the front door was closed. Almost certainly locked. That left the windows. They were glazed and intact, but more easily broken than the front door. I dragged the oft-forgotten pistol from my belt, and this time remembered the safety before I pulled the trigger. The glass broke.
“Go! Inside! Quick!” I yelled at Kallie and Dean. Dean pushed Kallie in first, then followed.
“Kim! Go!” I grabbed her arm, ruining her aim, and dragged her back. The nearest zombies were ten feet away and in front, part of a line four abreast. I raised the pistol, and fired, emptying the magazine. I don’t think it did any good, and it didn’t make me feel any better.
“Bill!”
Kim was inside. I limped back to the window. Dean grabbed my arms, and hauled me in. A hand clawed at my leg, caught around my foot, pulled, and began dragging me back. Kallie grabbed hold of my chest as Kim fired a shot into the zombie’s head. The three of us fell in a heap among the shattered glass and window frame as Kim kept firing.
“The front door,” I said, pushing myself to my feet. “Check it’s secure. Find a bookcase or table or something—”
“Bill!”
Kim had stepped back to reload. Arms waved through the window. The pressure of the undead behind was pushing the front rank forward and up. I raised the gun, pulled the trigger. It clicked, empty. I roared, slamming the pistol-butt down on the creature’s skull. It must already have been fractured because it split open. The sight of decayed brain dripping onto the floor brought me out of the brief rage. I dropped the gun, grabbed my knife from the floor, and stabbed and jabbed at every lifeless eye I could see.
“Bill. Back,” Kim calmly said. I stepped out of the way, and she resumed firing.
“The front door,” I said to Kallie and Dean. “Then check upstairs. Make sure we’re alone.”
“Um… that’s my knife,” Dean said. I looked at the weapon in my hand. It wasn’t mine. I gave it to him. “Go.” Then I looked for my own knife, but couldn’t see it. There was a wooden chair in the corner of the room. Two sharp kicks and it broke. I picked up the piece with the longest splinters just as Kim called.
“Bill!”
She stepped back, and I stepped into the breach, stabbing the chair leg forward. Splinters stuck in the ragged scalp of the flailing creature dragging itself through the window. They didn’t penetrate its skull. I swung again, battering its head. Again and again, uncertain I was doing any damage.
“Ready, Bill,” Kim said, calmly stepping forward. She fired. “Last magazine.” She fired again.
“The last?”
“Last.” She fired.
I picked up the pistol and reloaded. I’d only one spare magazine. When she was out, I’d hand her the gun; it was next to useless in my hands. “When you’re out, we’ll get the kids out the back door.”
“Right.” She fired.
“Front door’s secure,” Dean said.
“Upstairs is empty,” Kallie said.
“Okay,” I said calmly, as Kim fired again. “Get ready. We’re going for the back door, then run back to the raft.” I looked around the room, hoping against hope there’d be a weapon, or at least some inspiration for a better plan than a suicidal sprint. When I looked back at the window, there were only two zombies standing there. Kim fired. One zombie. She fired again. The window was empty. Silence descended. Only after it came, did I realise how much noise there’d been before.
Glass crunched as I walked to the window. There were dozens of bodies outside, fallen almost in a ramp. A few twitched, but none were upright.
“Okay, you really are a good shot,” I murmured. “Everyone outside. Quick. Before the rest come.”
“The rest?” Dean asked.
“The ones who heard the shots, the screams, the battle,” I said.
We went outside. Kallie and Dean retrieved their bows. I found the cutlass, and felt a million times safer with the familiar weight of cold metal in my hand. Even so, I felt a twinge of reluctance when I handed Kim the pistol.
There was a hiss of air escaping dead lungs. Dean stalked over to it, stabbing his knife down, again and again into the prone creature. Kallie opened her mouth, but I shook my head.
“Dean,” I said. “Dean? Which house were you looking for?”
“What?” he asked. He looked stunned, not quite back in reality.
“This isn’t the way to the golf course. I’m not sure it’s the way to the castle. So where were you leading us? Where are we? Who lives around here?”
“It’s… no one.”
“We made too much noise,” I said. “The zombies will be on their way. It’s a miracle they’re not here already. We need somewhere out of sight where we can hide. One house is as good as another, so it might as well be the one you want to visit. Which is it?”
“The next road,” he said.
“Then lead the way,” I said. “But cautiously. They’ll be here any second.”
Except I couldn’t hear them. That was odd. I’d not heard the ones that we’d killed, but they had all been motionless, waiting, sedentary. Logic dictated that other zombies should have been similarly clustered on the next street. More than that, they should have headed towards the sound of the battle. The street was empty. So was the narrow terrace leading off it.
Dean stopped in front of a green-painted door. The lock had been broken, but the door was held closed with a short length of rope tied from the letterbox to a strut for a hanging basket.
“Who lives here?” Kim asked.
“Miss Clements,” he said.
“Who’s that?”
“My… my piano teacher,” Dean said, blushing through the dirt and gore.
That hadn’t been what I was expecting. He’s not a tall lad, perhaps five foot nine, but his shoulders are wide, his arms broad, his biceps as large as mine. He’s got an old scar on his chin and a couple of newer ones on his arms. In short, he doesn’t look like a pianist, but then, which of us look the way we did a year ago?
I checked up and down the road. We were still alone, and that was making me more nervous than if the road had been full of the undead.
“We’d be safer inside for a few minutes,” I said. “You okay with that, Dean?”
“I… yeah, I guess.”
“I’ll go first,” I said, unlooping the rope. “I’ll check it out.”
Inside had that familiar musty smell of an abandoned house. A quick check upstairs and down confirmed it.
“There’s no one here,” I said. Dean came inside. Kallie and Kim followed. Inside, by the front door, was a very old-fashioned hat stand. Seven feet high, but only two wide, with a mirror at head height, made of oak that had been well-polished over the century or more since it had been built. More carefully than I would have done in any other house, I propped it against the broken door.
The front room had soundproofing on the walls, a piano in the middle, and the most comfortable chair I’d ever sat i
n. The back was hard, the seat unpadded, but it was marvellous just sitting down. The wall was covered in photos of smartly dressed children, all of whom were sitting at a piano, their faces a study in concentration.
“There’s a few clothes on the bed,” Kim said coming back down the stairs.
“And some tins and pasta,” Kallie said, coming out of the kitchen. “They were on the kitchen table. The pasta’s in Tupperware boxes. She must have been sorting her food when she decided to leave, and that must have been soon after the outbreak.”
Dean sat on the stool, though not facing the piano. “She’s probably dead, isn’t she?”
“Here’s the thing,” Kim said. “When I was being held, like a slave, I thought it was only me, Sanders, and Cannock left alive in the whole world. Then Bill found me. For a couple of days it felt like he and I were the last two people on Earth. Then we found Annette and Daisy. Then we found Bill’s brother, a brother he didn’t even know he had. After that, we found Anglesey and all those survivors. Now we’ve found you. Who knows what happened to anyone? It’s not the best prepared who survived, not the fittest, or the most martial. Soldiers died in their thousands, but wheelchair-bound Mrs O’Leary survived. Timing, luck, coincidence, fate; call it what you will, but the way I look at it, unless you know someone’s dead, assume they’re alive. You played the piano?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I’d like to hear you play,” I said. “Though not right now. There’s no undead outside. I don’t know how, but I think that group we fought must be the only ones in the area. For now, we need to get to the castle, then to the zoo. If there’s diesel there, we might be back on Anglesey in a couple of days. If there isn’t, we’ll come back here for the food.”
Kallie walked over to the wall of photographs and took one down. There was a vague resemblance between the boy in the picture and the blushing man at the piano. She put it in her pack.
“We’ll come back, Dean,” she said. “I promise.”
Belfast Castle is a burned out shell. It’s unclear how the fire started, though it has to be connected to the corpses outside. I counted twenty-seven, but think there are more around the wreck of the tow-truck that was parked right next to the walls. No doubt there are more bodies inside, but there’s no point investigating how many, nor whether they were human or undead. With most of them, I’ve no idea how you’d tell. Some were survivors who fought for their lives. That’s judging by the broken blades, empty shell casings, and twisted iron bars that lie close to some of the bodies. Judging by the charred double-barrels, the only firearms they had were shotguns. Does that mean they weren’t military, or that they’d used up all of the ammunition for their assault rifles? It took us ten minutes to confirm that, though survivors had taken refuge there, there are none there now. We left the ruins, with their panoramic view of the ruined city, and headed due north.
It was a short journey, about a mile, and it was almost pleasant. Birds circled overhead, and occasionally came close enough to perch on the near-bare tree branches. While I didn’t take that as proof there were no zombies ahead, I thought it was a strong suggestion. Indeed, the only undead we saw were a pair whose heads had been split open.
“Someone’s been this way,” Dean said, squinting into the distance.
“Not recently,” Kim said. “Look at the leaves. There’s an inch of them on top, and twice that underneath. It happened since the end of summer, but not within the last week at least.”
Kallie nudged one of the corpses with the toe of her boot. “In another week, they’ll be completely covered. We’d never have seen them.”
“I s’pose that’s as good as being covered with dirt in a grave,” Dean said.
“No,” Kallie said. “I was thinking about how zombies squat, motionless, when no people are around. I was thinking about how they might get covered by dirt and leaves, and by this time next year, we could walk right by them and not realise until it was too late.”
That was a grim thought to keep us company as we walked the last few hundred yards to the southern end of the zoo. There were three more dead zombies ten feet from a gated side-entrance. Two had been shot, the third had had its head staved in.
“How ’bout them?” Dean asked. “You think they were killed about the same time as the other two?”
“Hard to say,” Kim said. “No leaves on them, but…” We all looked up at the conifer overhanging that part of the fence. “That’s evergreen, isn’t it? Is it a pine?”
“Dunno,” Dean said. “But these zombies, these two, they were shot, right?”
“Looks like two bullets each,” I said. “Or is it three?”
“There have been people here,” Kallie said. “In Belfast, and recently, and with guns. Could it be Anglesey?”
My heart skipped a beat at the possibility, the slim chance that if she was correct. If they’d come here to the zoo, it could only be because they were surveying the city in preparation for some widespread looting. That meant they might still be in Belfast.
“Unlikely,” Kim said. “But we won’t find out standing here. We’ll go inside, but when we do, just in case there are people in there, try not to look like a zombie.”
Vines far more exotic than ivy curled around the gate, with leaves almost purple in colour. They must have flourished during the summer, but the onset of cold was causing them to die back.
“No squeak,” Kim said as she pulled the bolts back. “Someone oiled the gate.”
“Padlock,” Dean said. “Look. There!”
It lay in the dirt three feet from the gate.
“So someone cut it,” I said. “And closed the gate afterwards. Well, a zombie certainly couldn’t do that.”
We walked close together, eyes and ears open, stopping after twenty yards when we heard a soft scurrying in the undergrowth. It came again.
“What kind of animals did they have here?” I asked. “Any lions?”
“Lions? I don’t think so,” Dean said.
“They had tigers,” Kallie said.
“The one thing worse than zombies,” Kim murmured.
We moved closer together. The scurrying drew nearer, but not that much louder. The leaves of a spindly palm, five feet to our left, moved. Arrows were aimed, the rifle was pointed, my cutlass was raised and… and a small green head pushed its way through the undergrowth about an inch above the ground. An eon later, the head was followed by the rest of the tortoise. It turned a beady eye to us, as if it wanted us to get out of its way.
We saw no more animals before we got to the zookeeper’s complex of offices and labs, but we did find two more corpses outside the doors. They’d both been shot. The door’s locks were broken.
I reached for the handle, pulled the door open, but didn’t go inside. “Hello?” There was no response. “Hello?” I called again.
“They’ve gone,” Dean said, pushing past.
It turned out that he was correct. We’d entered through a staff area that led past a pair of storerooms to the veterinary surgery. In a bin was a bandage with a dark stain.
“Zombies don’t put soiled bandages in the bin,” Kim said.
“Okay, but what about this?” I said. In the corner of the room was a desk. On it was a box that had been opened.
“What is it?” Dean asked.
“A powdered, wide-spectrum antibiotic,” I said. “There’s a delivery note here. Arrived the day of the outbreak. And this is box four of eight. So there’re another seven boxes somewhere in the building. The question, though, is what it means that it’s still here. If I was staying somewhere in Belfast, I’d have taken this with me. Antibiotics? They’re more valuable than… well, almost as valuable as drinking water.”
“Should we take some?” Kallie asked. “For Charlie, I mean.”
“He seems to have recovered,” I said. “From what I remember, this is pretty nasty stuff. It’ll cure you, but you’ll feel like it’s made you worse. A few days running up and down the deck of the ship is
all he needs to get back to a hundred percent. That and a few decent meals.”
“So whoever shot the zombies outside has left the city?” Dean asked.
“Probably,” I said.
“Or they died,” Dean said.
“Possibly.”
“Then it’s not people from Anglesey?” Kallie asked.
I looked at the box. “No. Unfortunately not. They would certainly have taken these. They’d have left ammo or food behind to make room to carry it.”
“What about the bandage?” Dean asked. “What does that mean?”
“Someone was injured,” I said. “More than that, your guess is as good as mine.”
“We should bring Siobhan here,” Kallie said. “She’d be able to work it out.”
“If we’ve got time,” Kim said. “And we’re wasting it at the moment. Keep looking, we’re after food, remember.”
We didn’t find the other seven boxes in the shipment of which the antibiotics were part. I’m not sure if that means they were taken by a survivor, or if they’d been put away in the pharmacy before news of the outbreak reached the zoo’s staff. There were plenty of other medicines left in the medical storeroom. Glass-doored fridges took up one side of the room, and I assume the contents will no longer be efficacious. As to the contents of the shelves on the right-hand side, I didn’t recognise any of the manufacturer’s names, let alone the bottles’ and jars’ contents. I don’t know how many, if any, would still work and wouldn’t be poisonous to humans, but it was a greater concentration of pills than I’d seen in any pharmacy during our trek through Britain.
“Dean! Kim! Bill! I found it,” Kallie called. “You better come and see. It’s brilliant!”
It turned out to be the food stores. There were row upon row of shelves, on each of which were large plastic storage boxes. Each box contained packets and bags, all neatly labelled with a nutritional breakdown of the contents.
“It’s like Aladdin’s cave,” I said.
“Is it?” Dean asked. “It’s not really food.”
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland Page 23
