Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  “Well, that’ll do it,” I said, as he flexed his hands. “Anything broken?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  I pointed the gun through the shattered window. It was dark inside. “Too dark,” I said. “I can’t see anything, but she has to be in there. The zombies had to have followed her.”

  “I was thinking the same,” Colm said. He raised the axe. “You ready?”

  I was about to reach for the door handle when there was a crack of branches behind us. I spun around.

  It was Siobhan, the MP5 raised, with Kim a few steps behind.

  “Zombies,” I said a tad redundantly, gesturing at the corpses.

  Before I could say anything else, Colm pushed the door open, and charged into the building.

  It was empty. Not just of Kempton and zombies, but of the antibiotics and most of the food.

  “How did she manage it?” Kim asked, looking at the nearly empty shelves in the storeroom. “How did she carry the food away from here?”

  “A truck?” Colm suggested.

  “It has to be on foot,” I said. “That she left some food behind suggests there was a weight limit.”

  “Or the vehicle was full,” Colm said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Siobhan said taking down one of the few still-full plastic boxes of food. She began emptying it into her pack. “Do we wait here for her?”

  “No,” Kim said. “We can’t. How many zombies did you count?”

  “Since the gate? We didn’t see any until we got to this building,” I said.

  “We counted five,” Siobhan said.

  “Five?” Colm asked. “Don’t know how we missed them.”

  “They must have followed the animals into the undergrowth, and then followed the sound of you back on to the path,” Siobhan said. “More pertinently, Kempton had to have let them in.”

  “To protect the zoo?” I asked.

  “To trap us if we came looking for her,” Siobhan said.

  “What was that hand waving about, before you climbed the gate?” Kim asked.

  “I was trying to signal you should stay there,” I said. “I thought if Kempton shot us both, she’d go to check the gate was still secure. Then you could shoot her.”

  “I was meant to get all that from an arm-wave?”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “In retrospect, I could have made that a little clearer.” I walked over to the shelves, checking each box in turn. “Four and a half of these plastic storage containers left, and if Kempton let the zombies into the zoo, that means she doesn’t plan on coming back. We know she’s been looking for fuel, so it’s reasonable to assume she has some. What if she drove here, and the zombies followed the sound of the engine. Kempton loaded up the van or lorry or whatever it was. Then she drove off. She knew this food would be safe in these boxes for… well, I don’t know for how long, but it would be as safe as anywhere else.”

  “Colm, your bag. Quick,” Siobhan said. “Thanks. The question is where did she go.”

  “North,” I said. “It has to be. No one would drive into the city. There would be too many blocked roads.”

  “The motorway,” Kim said. “She’d follow the motorway. You saw what it was like. There were few cars, not too much mud. You could actually drive a reasonable distance away from here.”

  “Yeah,” Colm said. “All the way to the international airport. The motorway runs past it.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s stopped there,” Siobhan said. “She might not have planned to stop anywhere, or she left the vehicle a few miles away. There, that’s all the boxes emptied and the bags packed. We’ve enough food for five days and we can stretch that to a week. Wherever she’s driven that truck, the zombies will follow. They’ll surround it, and she won’t leave the food in the back, not until it’s secure. That gives us some time to get to the airport.”

  “And if that’s where she’s gone?” Colm asked.

  “What’s the alternative?” Siobhan replied.

  “There aren’t any,” Kim said. “And we don’t want to waste any more time discussing it. Bill?”

  “Hmm. Yes. Time to go.”

  “You look thoughtful,” Colm said.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing useful. I was just trying to think like Kempton. She shot a woman wearing her uniform. Kempton thinks that her people are after her, in which case… no. I don’t know.” The vague idea grew as we left the office. We walked close together, back towards the padlocked gate, treating each rustle of leaves as portending something far more sinister than before. We reached the entrance without having seen a moving zombie, and climbed over. It was only when we stood on the other side that a pair of undead drifted onto the path we’d just walked. They saw us and snarled.

  Kim half raised her rifle. “No, no point,” she said. “Leave them. Let’s go.”

  We headed away from the zoo, pausing when we reached the motorway.

  “I don’t know,” Siobhan said after five minutes of peering at the road’s surface, the leaves, the other vehicles. “There are a couple of scratches on this car that look fresh. It might have been done by a truck. It might not. I’m not sure. Give me a day to stare at a photograph of a decades’ old crime scene, and I’ll find the inconsistency, but I could stand here all day and not spot the obviously incontrovertible clue.”

  “And if she stored the truck somewhere in the north, she wouldn’t have come along this section of road,” Kim said.

  “Zombie,” Colm said. A solitary creature shambled towards us from the south. I raised the crowbar.

  “Leave it, and let’s go,” Siobhan said. “Which way to the raft?”

  “Due east,” Colm said. “We’ll have to go through the retail park. Maybe that’s it. That’s where she was living. I mean, if you wanted to build a fortress, why not go to the place with all the building supplies? Maybe convert one of the hardware warehouses.”

  “Bill?” Kim prompted.

  I turned away from the zombie and followed them, that vague notion still nagging at the back of my mind.

  The retail park was a shell, a mixture of bomb craters and burned ruins. It was confirmation, I think, that the bombs which fell on the harbour, and elsewhere on the island of Ireland, had been dumped by pilots who’d wished to lighten their load. The houses nearby looked undamaged, except for shattered windows, and that suggested the pilots hadn’t deliberately targeted the homes of civilians. Then again, why not drop the explosives in the sea? It was a puzzle, but a welcome one, a distraction from the more pressing issue of Kempton and where she might have gone.

  We detoured south around the bomb site and into the side streets.

  “Someone’s been here before us,” Kim said, gesturing at an open garage door.

  There was a bike inside, far enough away from the entrance that it had survived the worst of the rain. Kim slung her pack on the crossbar and wheeled it out. “We’ll need bikes to get to the airport,” she said.

  It took half an hour to find another two.

  “This is no good,” Kim said, inspecting the fourth. “The chain’s more rust than metal.”

  “You three go ahead,” I said. “I’ll catch up.”

  Kim gave me a knowing look. “You’re planning something.”

  “I’ve half an idea,” I said.

  “About what?” Colm asked.

  “It’s just a vague theory,” I said. “Kempton saw Kallie’s uniform, and fired before we were in range. It was a hasty shot, fired out of fear, I think. Then she loaded up a truck and drove north as fast as she could, heedless of how much extra danger that put her in.”

  “So?” Colm asked.

  “She fired hastily,” I said. “As I say, it’s only half an idea, but that house in Pallaskenry was just that, an ordinary house. It had an extraordinary garden, sure, but otherwise it was an ordinary building. I think that’s where her lair might have been. An ordinary house. When we first came to the zoo, we fought that battle with those zombies. Isn’t it odd
that there was one large pack of them on one street, and very few anywhere else? I think her lair might have been on that street. What if those zombies were there because they’d followed her home, one this day, two the next, until there were a few dozen outside. She didn’t care because she had a tunnel or some other way out, and those undead would act as a guard dog for her. They’d tell her when danger approached, and the only danger she actually feared was people. We came along. We fought the undead. She saw that. She saw us. That’s why she was looking for us the following day. It wasn’t coincidence, just dumb bad luck that we happened to walk right past her. Like I said, it’s only a theory. I could be wrong, but if her house is one of those on that street, then that’s where the fuel is.”

  “We could check that out,” Colm said. “By bike, we can be there in half an hour. Less, even.”

  “No,” I said. “Kempton’s gone. There’s no point us all going. Get the food back to the ship, that’s key. That’s a week of life.”

  “You sure?” Kim asked.

  “You know the way?” Colm asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Are you going to go back to the raft?”

  “I think we’ll cycle,” Kim said. “Go through the harbour.”

  “And if I find a bike, I’ll do the same,” I said. “If I can’t, I’ll head back to the raft. Either way, I’ll be back at the ship in a couple of hours.”

  Kim checked her watch. “Three hours. No more.” She didn’t add that if I was longer, she’d come looking for me, I could see it in her eyes.

  It wasn’t just a moon shot, or desperate last hand, the odds were far worse than that. If I was right, and Kempton’s lair was disguised as an ordinary house, I could stand right outside it and not know, but I had to look. The idea had begun to dawn while we were in the zoo’s storeroom, looking at those plastic boxes. It had taken me back to my escape from London, when I’d wracked my brain for places that might contain food. It had taken me weeks to realise that the places to look were the unusual ones, the places that other people wouldn’t already have searched. Not the supermarkets and shops, but the universities and schools.

  Of course, Belfast was different to London, there had been no evacuation here. And Kempton was different from me. She’d known the apocalypse was coming. She’d had time to prepare, and those preparations had been extensive. The ship, Elysium, Pallaskenry, and the embarkation list. No doubt there were other facets to her scheme that we’d not discovered. At the heart of it was that she knew the world was going to end. From the note left by Captain Keynes, we knew that Kempton was in Ireland. We knew she hadn’t gone to Elysium, or to the ship. In which case, she must have remained in the same place she’d been all along, and that brought me to the plastic boxes.

  It was only when I’d reached Brazely Abbey that I’d realised how time consuming it was to gather food. It took a day to search a few houses and take the food back to the Abbey. Even so I’d realised that within a few months, I’d have searched everywhere nearby. After that, it would require a day of traveling to reach an un-looted house. I’d realised that it wouldn’t be long before I’d have to travel so far that it wouldn’t be worth returning to the Abbey. When I was travelling with Kim and the girls, and then with Sholto, and there were more mouths to feed, that truth became starkly evident. It was the same truth that Siobhan and Colm had experienced, but one that Kempton would have considered and prepared for.

  It was the plastic boxes. Not just in the zoo, but in the house of the piano teacher. The academics’ house was an exception, but we’d not looked in enough other properties for that to disprove the theory. I was sure I was right. Kempton hadn’t bothered stockpiling the food. She’d left it where it was, close to hand, but in boxes that were proof against rodents and damp, ready to be collected when winter finally came. She’d taken the fuel from the vehicles outside because of the risk it would evaporate. It made sense. It was a theory that fit the facts. All that was left was to find the house because if I did that, I’d find the fuel that she’d left behind.

  I crossed the motorway, and went down onto Whitewell Road, following it until I reached Serpentine Gardens. I was looking for a house like the bungalow at Pallaskenry, and that was more likely to be on a side road. I took the turning, but paused after fifty yards when I came to a corpse: a zombie with a neat bullet hole in the forehead and three ragged ones in its chest. It’s hard to tell when that had happened, but it wasn’t recently. I thought of the other bodies we’d seen. Well, Kempton had been here for months, of course she’d killed the undead. How much ammunition did she have? Enough, obviously, because there was another corpse two houses down. I walked slowly, listening, looking for birds as much as the undead. I reached the end of Serpentine Gardens, and took Serpentine Road south. By my reckoning, I was only a few hundred yards north of the golf course. I just had to reach that, follow the fence to the northeastern corner, then find my way back to the piano teacher’s house. In my head I could picture it easily enough. I came across another zombie, dead. Then a corpse with its head untouched. Not a zombie, then. He’d been a survivor, shot three times in the chest, and from close range by the look of it. The man’s clothes were rags, and his face was covered in mud. I couldn’t see his features, but could imagine the hard times he’d had before he reached Belfast. He must have been starving when he reached the city. Kempton had shot him.

  It tallied, sadly, with my theory that she’d decided to claim the city as her own. Rodents and damp weren’t the only threat to her supplies. No, the real threat would be people. Yet they were easily dealt with if you had an almost infinite supply of ammunition. I walked on. Kempton was mad. There was no point trying to rationalise her actions.

  I reached the end of the road. A corpse lay fallen across the sign on the opposite side of the junction. I pushed it out of the way with the crowbar. It read Whitewell Road. I was back where I’d started.

  “Serpentine Road? Well, you’re well named aren’t you?” I checked the time. An hour had passed since I’d left Kim and the others. It was time to make my way back.

  I heard something, eastward, further down the road. It came again, the sound of leaves being pushed apart. Kempton? I stalked forward, eyes on the ground as much as ahead, cautiously placing each foot so as not to disturb leaf, branch, or broken glass.

  The road curved, the figure came into view. It wasn’t Kempton, but a zombie. I stepped across the road to the shelter of an overhanging bay tree, watching the creature lurch east. It wasn’t moving quickly, but when do they ever? It was moving determinedly, as if it was in pursuit. Still holding to my theory that Kempton had driven north, that left Kim, Colm, and Siobhan as its prey. In which case, they’d not returned to the raft, but were cycling back to the harbour. I followed, but I didn’t hurry. It wasn’t just that, by bike, they’d already have reached the ship, it was also the corpse of that survivor. I’d no stomach for more violence. Even so, and even walking so slowly, I was going to catch up with it.

  A flock of seagulls took off from the rooftops a few hundred yards further east. The zombie took no heed of their flapping and squawking as it limped methodically on. It passed a turning, and a few minutes later I did the same. There was a sign indicating the road led to Hazelbank College. Hazelbank, that was the same name as the park where we’d come ashore. The coast had to be close, then. The question was how close. A better question was where, precisely, was I? I’d follow the road until I found a sign, and that meant following the zombie.

  Hazelbank College? I looked down the road. Perhaps that’s where Kempton’s lair was. It’s the kind of place I’d choose for a refuge. High fences, flat roofs, lots of tools and other supplies, and ringed by a car park and playing fields so you could see the zombies coming. Then again, that was a rational choice, and the billionaire Kempton was anything but rational. She’d known about the apocalypse and done nothing to stop it. She’d stayed in Belfast rather than seek out other survivors, rather, even, than going to Elysium to join up wit
h her employees. No, there was no rational explanation for what she’d done.

  The zombie had reached the junction with Shore Road. I could smell the sea. Then I heard something. No, someone. Someone whistling a tune. A tune I’d heard before. It was getting louder. No, it was getting closer. The zombie abruptly turned to its right, speeding up, heading towards a narrow alley that ran between a shuttered retail unit and a wide-roofed hall. It managed three steps, and then it fell, crumpling into a heap.

  Automatically, I ducked inside the open gate of the nearest house on the left-hand side of the road, and took cover behind a hedgerow. I edged forwards until I found a gap through which I could see the road. The whistling started up again. I had heard it before. Near Elysium. It was the same tune that the gravedigger, O’Reardon, had been whistling.

  A moment later, a figure came out of the alley. A woman, carrying a submachine gun in her hands. I’d not heard the shots, but that was how she’d killed the zombie. The woman swept the gun up and down the road, and as she did, I saw the weapon’s profile. I saw the silencer attached to it. I saw the clothes the woman was wearing. She’d not used a silencer when she’d shot Kallie, but it was her. It was the shooter. She hadn’t left. She hadn’t gone north. She’d stayed in Belfast.

  The question was whether she’d seen me. She must have spotted that zombie following her. She took a step away from the corpse, walking west up the road towards me. If she had seen me, then she must have seen my limping, slow pace, and taken me for one of the undead. She took another step. The submachine gun was at her shoulder, but the barrel wasn’t pointing at the hedge where I was hidden. She didn’t know where I was. She took another cautious step, stopped, and whistled another bar of that song.