Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  “Look at this,” I said, opening a large blue-lidded box. Inside was a sack out of which had spilled small brown nuggets, each the size of my thumbnail. “Protein, carbohydrates, calcium, all in one handy pellet.”

  “Like I said, not food,” Dean said.

  “But it’ll keep us alive,” I said. “I think you’re right, though. I think whoever shot those zombies is dead. You might leave antibiotics if you had no immediate use for them, but no one would leave a food stash like this.”

  “Great, but it’s getting late,” Kim said. “We’ve found food, we’ve found medicine. What we need is fuel, and to get back to the ship. We’ll check the car park on our way out.”

  The site-vehicles were kept behind the office. The fuel tanks were empty. The caps had been removed.

  “Footprint,” Kim said, pointing at a patch of mud where the constant passage of heavy vehicles had turned gravel to dirt. “And not full of water. Fresh, a couple of days old.”

  “But there’s no diesel, right?” Dean said. “So shall we go back? I mean, we can’t carry much. We’ll need a cart or something to collect the rest of that food. Not that you can call it food.”

  “A cart? Good point,” Kim said cheerily over the sound of his continued grumbling. “There’re no wheel marks, so how did they carry the fuel away?”

  “Maybe they left it here,” I said. “Remember how George and Mary did that at the beginning of the outbreak?”

  After a fruitless hour searching the zoo, we gave up. There were too many places that the fuel could have been hidden, but I don’t think it was. The visitors’ car park had only a few vehicles in it, but they’d been emptied as well, both the diesel and the petrol vehicles.

  “I think,” I said, as we stood by the main entrance, looking at the abandoned vans and cars, “that it’s time to go back. We can search for days, but there might be nothing to find.”

  “This is giraffe food?” Charlie asked again.

  “That’s right,” I said. “It’ll make your neck grow nice and long.”

  He gave me a look, half questioning, half suspicious. It was as if he was eighty percent certain I was joking, but there was a smidgeon of childish doubt that I might be telling the truth.

  Billy took one, and crunched down on the pellet. “Yum. That’s— yuck!” He spat it out. “That’s disgusting.”

  “But it’s full of protein, fibre, and vitamins,” I said.

  Siobhan took one. Tried it. Grimaced. “We can boil them up, I suppose. Did you find anything else?”

  “Not that we brought back,” I said. “But there are medical supplies in the zoo’s veterinary office. I don’t think there’s anything we need immediately, but they’d be of use to Anglesey.”

  “What about fuel?” Siobhan asked.

  “We struck out,” I said. “There’s nothing at the zoo. Someone beat us to it, and recently we think. What about you?”

  “The harbour’s empty,” Colm said. “No ships at all. Nothing that can float, at least. There’re are a few wrecks and a lot of driftwood. The buildings are a mess; half are on the verge of falling down. Goliath and Samson are still standing, though. The harbour’s cranes,” he added. He glanced at the children, but they weren’t listening. “There are… bodies. Some from the bombing, I think. It’s interesting that there were people here when the bombs were dropped. I suppose they wanted a way out of Belfast, and came to the harbour in the hope a ship would come in.” Tamara glanced up. “In short,” Colm finished, “we’ve got those chocolate bars, and not much else.”

  There were four of them, and they were in the middle of the table, being saved for dessert. Tamara’s, Billy’s, and Charlie’s eyes had barely left them since we’d returned. I think they were making sure that the adults didn’t steal the chocolate while their backs were turned. Dean, Kallie, and Lena had disappeared towards the prow of the ship, ostensibly to watch the shore for smoke or lights. I think they just wanted to be alone together, so they could process being back in Belfast, the city in which their friends and families had died.

  “What about you?” I asked Siobhan.

  “Kids, report?” she prompted.

  Charlie sat upright. Billy slouched forward, his eyes glued to the chocolate bars.

  “The fresh water tank is empty,” Tamara said. “The toilets are flushed with seawater, but there’s a pump and that doesn’t work.”

  “Because there’s no power,” Billy chimed in.

  “What else, other than the toilets,” Siobhan prompted.

  “There’s toilet paper,” Charlie said.

  “Right. Yes,” Siobhan said. “And some soap, and a few personal possessions the crew left behind, but what else?”

  “Oh, you mean the TVs and computers in the shipping containers?” Billy said.

  “Only in one,” Charlie said. “The other had mugs and plates and stuff.”

  He gestured at the assortment of plates on the table. They had a mixture of green and gold I-heart-Ireland, and red, white, and blue keep-calm-and-eat-dinner patterns.

  “Plates and mugs,” Siobhan said. “So at least we won’t have to worry about washing up.”

  “No, not if we have to eat that stuff,” Billy said, gesturing at the box of pellets we’d brought back.

  “I don’t think we’ll find any food on the ship,” Siobhan said. “The manifest was in the captain’s cabin, along with a diary of sorts. Here.” She held out a book.

  It wasn’t detailed, nor were there entries for every day, and it wasn’t in English.

  “I… no, I don’t understand this. My Spanish isn’t great,” I said.

  “Because that’s Portuguese,” Siobhan said. “They set out from China, bound for Belfast, but were at sea when they heard of the outbreak. They continued because they couldn’t turn back. While at sea, they were warned not to try to enter British or Irish waters. That’s where they stayed until they ran out of food. They had a debate as to where they could reach, and where might be safe. That same blockade that prevented them making landfall made them think that these islands would be less dangerous than the European mainland. They had a debate as to which port to head for, and Belfast won. The next entry, though, suggests not everyone was happy with that. When they got here, they split into two groups. One took the lifeboats and set out for England. The other…” Now it was her turn to glance at the children. They were watching her.

  “What?” Billy asked. “What happened to them?”

  “Yeah, you just said they’d gone,” Tamara said accusingly. “You didn’t say they’d left a note.”

  “In the last entry, the captain says they’re going into Belfast to look for food. That’s all.”

  “That’s not very interesting,” Charlie said. “I thought it was going to be something more exciting.”

  “She means that they died,” Billy said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Siobhan shrugged. “They didn’t come back.”

  There was a fraction of a second of reflection on that, broken by Charlie. “So can we have dinner?”

  “Soon,” Siobhan said. “We need to put out some containers to collect rainwater. Not just for drinking, we should clean some of the deck. Too many birds have called this boat home in the last few months. And we’ll need somewhere we can light a fire, and that means we need things we can burn.”

  “And then what?” Billy asked.

  “We stick with the plan,” Kim said. “Fuel and food. But we’re safe.”

  Which was a polite way of saying that, for the moment, we weren’t going anywhere.

  “He meant when can we eat the chocolate,” Charlie said.

  “I could get used to this,” Kim said, as we walked around the boat. We weren’t heading anywhere, or doing anything more important than stretching our legs. “I feel safe, properly safe. It’s not like Anglesey. I mean, there we’re safe when we’re indoors, but outside I… well, I just can’t used to it. Here, surrounded by steel, and perhaps because it feels so artificial, I
do feel like nothing can hurt me.”

  “Unless there’s a storm wild enough to rip the ship from its anchor,” I said.

  “Or an asteroid slams into the Earth,” Kim said. “I know we’ll never be truly safe, but were we ever? Even before the outbreak, wasn’t it really an illusion, a trick we played on ourselves based on the statistical probability we’d be alive tomorrow. We could still have died in any of a thousand pointlessly random ways. Here, at least I feel safe.”

  “Until we have to go ashore,” I said. “And we do have to go ashore.”

  “Oh, I know it’s a dream, another illusion, but why not luxuriate in it. After all, we’re going to be here for at least a week.” She moved in closer. “It’s going to be one fuel tank syphoned after another, a litre here, half a litre there. Or we’ll go to the airport and spend just as long trying to work out how to cart the fuel back. Either way, it’ll take a while, and then it’ll be me, not we, who’ll leave. Only one of us needs to go, and I’m far better at handling a boat than you are. First we’ve got to get the fuel, and that means we’ve got to find it. If we can.”

  “You think we won’t?”

  “All the boats are gone from the harbour, Bill. All of them. There had to be more people wanting to leave than there were ships available. What happened to the people who were left behind? Some stayed and died when the harbour was bombed, sure, but others would have gone somewhere else. They’d have driven if they could, searched for cars and fuel if they couldn’t. It makes me wonder if the footprint at the zoo wasn’t left by the person who emptied the fuel tanks. I wonder if that person was like us. Someone who came here recently, searching for fuel only to find the tanks long since emptied, or the fuel evaporated during the long, hot summer. When they found the tanks empty, where would they go? They searched the harbour, the city, the zoo, where’s next but the international airport? There’s no point fretting over it tonight. We’ll see what we find tomorrow and take it from there, and then… home. Or Anglesey, at least.”

  “You don’t think of it as home?” I asked.

  “I miss Annette and Daisy, even your brother, but it’s not really home. Our little society is too new, too fragile, for it to be called that. Do you think of it as that? You don’t still think of London as home?”

  “London? That was never home for me,” I said. “It was the place I lived, it was the place I worked, but it wasn’t home. I’m not sure I ever really had a home. It wasn’t Caulfield Hall. It certainly wasn’t that boarding school. I’d like to go back to London, though. Maybe next year, before it’s flooded. I’d like to see parliament, the monuments, but because I want to remember the city as something other than the nightmare from which I barely escaped. What about you? Do you ever think of going home, to your old home, I mean?”

  “It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately,” she said.

  “I guessed.”

  She stopped walking, leaned against the rail, and stared out to sea. “There’s a difference between the place you call home and where you feel most at home, and the place I was most at home was Oregon. The people I met there were like my family, but somehow… better. I mean, I know that I was a guest on a fleeting visit, and so only saw the better aspects of them, but even so, I felt like I truly belonged. I think that was my downfall. It made me see what a happy life could be, and that made me think I could have it just by wanting. Of course, then I returned to England and I saw what my life really was going to be. A degree in a subject I didn’t understand, a job I wouldn’t enjoy, a mortgage I couldn’t afford, and a family with someone whom I’d have said was my soul mate because that’s better than saying it was someone I settled for. Essentially, I saw my future life as the same one my parents had, complete with the regret that it could all have been so different.”

  “You don’t talk about your parents much,” I said.

  “Because of regrets,” she said. “I regret that I didn’t ever get to know them. I suppose that’s how it always is with parents and children. Sorry, I suppose you don’t. I mean I knew them as a child and so saw them through a child’s prism of reality. In that, they were always fighting. Growing up, all I wanted to do was get away from that, and that meant getting away from them. That meant university and an ill-chosen course, picked mostly on the fact they accepted me. Then it was America, because that was far away. When I came back, I wanted to start over. I didn’t want my future to be like my parents’ past. I wanted to start my life again, to become someone truly unique, different, my own person, not just this child rebelling against all she’d grown up with. It’s not that I cut ties with them. I… well, I feel bad saying it, but I didn’t think I had any use for them. I don’t know how fair that is, and there’s little point dwelling on it now. I saw them during the holidays and spoke to them on the phone, but I never really knew them. I never got to know them as people, and they never knew me.”

  “Do you ever think of looking for them?” I asked. “You were right, what you said to Dean. They might be alive.”

  “They’re not,” she said. “They’re dead.”

  “Before the outbreak?”

  “You remember after we left Longshanks Manor? After Salisbury Plain and we saw the lions? Do you remember that house we found when we were looking for bicycles, the one with the note on the door? There were keys and some food hidden under a box on which was a bear. It had Gertie on a ribbon around its neck.”

  “That was your parents’ house?”

  “No. Their home was the one with the green door on the street before. You remember we checked the fuel tank? Their house was empty. They’d gone on the evacuation.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.

  “They’re dead, Bill. So is Dean’s piano teacher. So is Mark and everyone else. That’s the truth of it. We can tell the children otherwise, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. No, we’re it. We’re all that’s left. Everything else, everyone else, they’re just memories.”

  “Then we should make some new ones,” I said.

  Kim smiled. I think she sensed how uncomfortable I was. “Not here,” she said. “Bermuda, maybe. Or… where was it? St Helens. No, St Helena. You and me, Annette and Daisy. Sholto, too, I suppose. I don’t know who else, or whether we should invite anyone else.”

  “We should probably invite someone who has a boat,” I said. “It’ll be a long swim, otherwise.”

  Her smile widened, and she moved closer. “The world we knew is gone, Bill. It’s history, and soon that’s all it will be. We’ll live on Anglesey or somewhere like it, and you’ll turn your journals into a proper history of the end of the old world. A chronicle for the children, and their children’s children as they create a new one. And you should make it more upbeat. Less fighting, and more…”

  “More tortoises and lions?” I asked.

  “Maybe. More love, less war. I do love you, Bill. I don’t say it enough. You don’t say it enough. You certainly don’t write it enough, but you should. We spend too much time thinking about the past and worrying about the future. Maybe we just need to enjoy this moment, here, and the ones that are like it. The times when we’re safe, without worrying about a future where we won’t be. Yes, we’ve survived. Us, here. You and me. Tonight, that’s enough.”

  Chapter 20 - Belfast

  11th October, Day 213

  What a difference a day makes. Not even a day, not really. It began so optimistically, but that was dashed in an instant.

  “Everyone clear on the plan?” Siobhan asked. “Bill, Kallie, Dean, you’re going back—”

  “To the zoo,” Dean cut in. “We leave a note in case whoever went there returns, and we bring back enough food for a week.”

  “And paint,” Tamara said. “Don’t forget the paint so we can do a message for the satellites.”

  “We won’t forget,” I said.

  “Good,” Siobhan continued. “Kim and Colm will look for fuel at the George Best Airport.”

  “Runway, hangars, c
ar park,” Billy said.

  “That’s it lad,” Colm said.

  “So can I come, too?” the boy asked eagerly.

  “Not this time,” Colm said. “Let us check it out first, then we’ll see. Besides, you’ve got important work to do here.”

  “Yeah, we’ve got to see what’s in the rest of the containers,” Charlie said. He sounded excited. I suppose that’s understandable. What child wouldn’t enjoy a day of adult-sanctioned looting with a small dash of destruction on the side?

  “When do you think your Anglesey people came over to the international airport,” Dean asked as we rowed away from the ship.

  “The expedition was due to leave just after Kim and I set out for Elysium,” I said. “Rough seas might have delayed them for a day or two, but no longer. Other than Scott Higson, an Australian pilot, the mission was being undertaken by French Special Forces and U.S. Marines. Let’s say a day to cross the sea, a day to reach Lough Neagh, another day to clear the airport and load the plane. So three days if all went well, but even if they were delayed, they’d be back on Anglesey within a week of setting out.”

  “But they’d have gone through Belfast, through the city,” Dean said. “That’s my point.”

  “Would they?” I asked myself as I pulled the oar. I thought wistfully of Heather Jones, and how she’d refused to let Sholto and I row from Menai Bridge to Bangor. We had about twice that distance to cover, and it was muscle-burning work. “It’s a good question. I don’t know. I wasn’t part of the planning team. Um…” I pulled on the oar and mulled over the question. “No, I don’t know.”

  “But they probably would,” Dean said. “I mean the airport’s west of the city, so it’d be easier to moor a boat here than at an empty beach.”

  “Why are you asking?” Kallie asked.

  “They’d have gone through George Best Airport,” Dean said. “That’s my point. If there was anything there, they’ll have taken it, right, Bill?”

  “Ah…” I used the act of rowing to gain time to think of a politick reply. After another, slow ten metres, I settled for, “Hard to say. The plane was the goal, but it wasn’t the prize. Nor was the fuel. The real prize was getting people on Anglesey working on something. Clearing the runway on Anglesey was the start. The hope was they’d volunteer for other tasks after that. Farming, or joining the trips to the small islands. Helping build a transmitter, working some farmland, or doing something other than sitting on a boat out in the harbour occasionally fishing. It worked. Rather, when we left, it was beginning to.”