Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  “Stand back,” Kim said. I moved to the side as she aimed her rifle and torch down into the hole.

  I added my light and Dean added his. All I saw were steep steps stretching down into the darkness.

  “We don’t have to go down there,” Kim said.

  “I think we do,” I said. I slapped my hand on the hatch. It rung, dully. We listened. There was no sound from below.

  “Then do it quickly,” Kim said. “Noon’s approaching, and we’ve got to rendezvous with Colm and Siobhan.”

  “I’ll go,” Dean said.

  Before he could, I went down first.

  The steps were steep enough to be called a ladder, and it would have been easier to descend them as such, but I wanted to see what I was heading into. The ladder went down. And down. And down. And stopped. I looked up. I was about thirty feet below the level of the warehouse floor.

  “Bomb shelter,” I said. “Definitely a bomb shelter.”

  I shone the light around. I was in a vestibule about ten feet by eight, with another airlock door leading from it. I tried the handle, the door swung outward. The air beyond smelled stale. It looked a little like a decontamination chamber with nozzles on the ceiling.

  “Hello!” There was no response. At the far end was another mechanical airlock. It led to a corridor with a door at the end, two on either side. These weren’t airlocks, though, but sliding partitions. I heard steps behind, but it was only Dean.

  “Kim’s staying up at the top,” he said. “In case the hatch falls closed or something.”

  “Okay. Look around.”

  “What for?” he asked.

  “We’ll know it when we find it,” I said.

  What we found was a miniature version of the basement at Elysium. There were two rooms with four bunks and lockers apiece. Each locker contained two sets of Kempton’s uniform. The jackets were missing except in one locker.

  “Heat-proof, water-resistant,” I muttered, fingering the material. “So you took these because they were functional. Or was it for some other reason.”

  “Bill, I found more ammo,” Dean called.

  Opposite the sleeping rooms were two other doors. One was to a spartan bathroom. The other led to a storeroom. Most of the shelves were empty. The rest contained boxes of ammunition.

  “Not much ammo,” I said. “About the same as I found upstairs. A few thousand rounds.”

  “That sounds like a lot,” Dean said.

  “Not the way she was using it,” I said. “It would have been gone in another month.”

  The door at the far end of the corridor led to a kitchen. Dining room might be a better word, as I don’t think they planned to cook down there. It contained a table and eight chairs.

  “Some cards in this cupboard,” Dean said. “Nothing else. There’s no board games or books or anything.”

  “They weren’t going to stay here long,” I said. “It was a bomb shelter, yes? A place to survive the nuclear war, to wait until the fallout had settled before going south to Elysium. They planned to be here for three days, or a week, but not much longer. They wouldn’t need comfort.”

  “Okay, so why did they need a bunker in Northern Ireland? I mean, yeah, she was expecting a nuclear war, but why didn’t she stay on her boat, or go to a compound in Alaska or somewhere?”

  “A very good question,” I said. “Probably because she expected Quigley to betray her, so this would have been her escape plan. She had a big house in Belfast to which he would send his assassins, and when they arrived, she would take that as her cue the war was about to begin. She’d hide here and wait it out, except… Ah, who cares? It hardly matters now. You know what, I think the reason this place exists is mostly due to paranoia.”

  There was one other door leading from the kitchen, and it led to a small office. There was a desk with a computer. I tried it, but it didn’t turn on.

  “Of course not. Maybe if we turn the generator on—”

  “Bill?” Kim’s voice came from above.

  “Time for us to go,” I said. “Coming,” I called out, shining the light around the small chamber. There was a hatch on the wall. Thinking it might hide a safe, I opened it, but it just contained access to pipes. “Probably part of the air-recycling system.” I closed the hatch, and caught sight of something on the ground. A slim book. I picked it up.

  “What is it?” Dean asked.

  “An exercise book. A…” I opened it. I laughed. “A journal. Of sorts.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t get excited, it’s really not worth it. Let’s go.”

  Carrying the book, I followed him back outside and up the ladder.

  “Show me the book,” Dean said, when we got to the top.

  I handed it to him.

  “My name is Sorcha Locke. I am alone,” he read. “I am alone. I am alone.”

  “Is that it?” Kim asked. She took the book and flipped through it. “She wrote ‘I am alone’ hundreds of times on every page—” Something fell out of the book, and fluttered to the floor. It was a photograph. I picked it up.

  “That’s Lisa Kempton in the middle,” I said.

  “And that’s the woman you shot,” Dean said. “She sort of looks like her. So is she Sorcha Locke?”

  “I think so,” Kim said. “Kempton’s representative in Ireland if not on Earth, that’s how she was described in the suicide note we found in Elysium. That woman next to Kempton, I think that’s Tamika Keynes, the captain of the ship, The New World. One of the voice recordings she left said Locke had gone looking for Kempton. I suppose Locke came here. Probably thought Kempton had taken refuge in that bunker. Locke stayed. I suppose she knew Elysium had fallen, the ship had arrived with news the rest of the world was gone. I suppose Kempton’s dead too. Maybe Locke even killed her. Maybe that’s why she wrote that she was alone. Hmm. Bill? This woman here, do you think it’s the gravedigger, O’Reardon?”

  I took the photograph from her, and took another, more careful look. “It might be,” I said. “It’s hard to— Who’s that?” I pointed at a woman standing in a corner, slightly behind the rest of the people, almost as if she wasn’t a part of the group.

  “No idea,” Kim said.

  “I think I’ve seen her somewhere,” I said.

  “With Kempton?” Kim asked.

  “No, since the outbreak,” I said.

  “On Anglesey?” Dean asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Then someone did get back to Anglesey from Elysium,” Kim said. “Someone did tell Rob about the tunnel.”

  “Could be,” I said. I just wasn’t sure. The people in the picture were all dressed in thousand-pound suits, a far cry from the find-and-darn clothing that the survivors of Anglesey wore.

  “It’s easy to confirm,” Kim said. “But first we need to get back to Anglesey. For that, we need to get the fuel back to the ship. So first, we need to go and get Colm and Siobhan. I hope she hasn’t decided to go to the airport.”

  We left the warehouse, and let Dean lead us back to the rendezvous. He seemed more confident. Not happy, but as if a weight had been taken from his shoulders. I felt like another weight had been added to mine. It was that woman in the photograph. I knew I’d seen her before. It was frustrating being unable to place where, and it was distracting. I didn’t notice the zombies until Dean raised a hand.

  “I’ve got them,” he said.

  “No,” Kim said. “Wait. Watch. We need to know which way they were going.”

  I don’t think we did. I think she just wanted to keep Dean from running into danger. It would be a poor turn if, having found enough fuel to get us that final leg back to Anglesey, one of us were to die now.

  Kim unslung her rifle. “You take the one on the right?”

  “Sure,” I said, drawing the sword I’d taken from Locke’s corpse. “Dean, watch the road behind.

  I stepped across the road. The closest zombie staggered towards me. It wore a dress with an ornate floral pattern, almost
a 1920s style, though with a very twenty-first-century cut. Its left arm hung by her side, the hand was missing at the wrist, and the rest of her forearm was a mangled ruin of black pus.

  There was a soft retort followed by a loud thud as Kim fired, and the second zombie collapsed. The undead woman in front of me half turned. With my left hand on the pommel, I swung the short-sword at its head. The blade sliced through skin, smashed through bone, pulverised brain, and came out the other side. For a moment, the zombie stood, frozen. Then it collapsed.

  “I need to get me a sword like that,” Dean said. “We’ll have to check the warehouse. Maybe there’s—”

  “Shh!” Kim said. “Listen.”

  Something rustled close by. It came again; a dragging, crackling sound of leaves being pushed out of the way.

  “It’s over there,” Dean said. He stalked towards a house on the other side of the road. He stopped by a car parked in the driveway. “Zombie,” he said, “But it can’t really move.”

  Cautiously, though I can’t say why, we walked over to join him.

  The zombie was on the ground, crawling through a drift of leaves.

  “Legs must be broken,” I said as it raised an arm. The arm came down. Its mouth opened. Its mouth closed. It didn’t open again.

  “Is that it?” Dean asked. He took a step closer.

  “No,” Kim grabbed his arm and dragged him back. “Don’t.”

  “It’s dead,” Dean said. “Look at it. It just died.”

  I prodded its arm with the sword. The zombie didn’t move. I prodded its head. It still didn’t move.

  “I think—” I began, and stopped. I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to tempt fate. I didn’t want to believe that Dean might be correct in case he was wrong. I so wanted it to be true. I’d wanted it to be true since the beginning of the outbreak. Here it was, here was the proof. A zombie had finally died.

  Except, this wasn’t the first time we’d seen it. I thought back to the zombie Kim had seen collapse at Kerry airport. We’d assumed some unseen survivor had shot it, but what if there had been no survivor? Then there were the corpses in the river at Malin Head, the zombie that had seemed to slip near the vehicle barricade by Mark’s house, the zombie in the school assembly hall. As I thought back, I remembered other times when they’d seemed to slip, trip, or otherwise collapse.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “I think it’s dead. It’s not the first one.”

  “Best be sure,” Kim said. She fired a shot, not at its head, but into its back. We waited, watching. “It’s not moving,” Kim said. She fired again, into its skull. Then I knew.

  “All those corpses,” I said. “The ragged ones with bullets in the chest. I think those were zombies. Maybe not all of them, but some of them. I think Locke shot them in the chest just to be sure.”

  “Maybe,” Kim said uncertainly.

  “No, definitely,” I said. “Near the warehouse, there was a corpse so desiccated it had to have been a zombie. Then there’s Locke’s eye. The birds ate it. They don’t touch the undead, do they? They didn’t touch the other corpses, the ones Locke shot. And she shot them just like you did, she shot them in the chest to make sure they were dead.”

  “Maybe,” Kim said again. “But if she really wanted to be sure, she’d have shot them in the head. No, I want to believe it’s true, but I’m not going to bet my life on it, not when we had to kill those two creatures out in the road.”

  “Right, but zombies would be like people,” I said. “They’d have different life expectancies. Presumably based on the health of the human whose corpse they—”

  “Bill?” Kim said, that warning tone in her voice. “This isn’t the time. There were two zombies in the road. We need to get the fuel, and get it back to the ship. We need to get back to Anglesey. When we’re safe, we can talk about it, but we’re not safe, yet.”

  “Don’t watch! Get the raft loaded!” Kim snapped as she slid another magazine into the MP5. She fired another shot. I didn’t wait to see if the zombie fell. I grabbed the container from the electric handcart, and hauled it towards the raft. I was halfway there when Colm overtook me, a container in each hand. He dumped them into the raft, then came back and took the one I was carrying.

  “That’s it,” he said, putting it into the raft next to the others.

  I turned around.

  Kim, Siobhan, and Lena stood, facing the undead. The young woman fired her bow, Kim and Siobhan fired the MP5s, sending a hail of bullets, peppered with the occasional arrow, into the undead lumbering towards us. These creatures certainly weren’t dying.

  It was the sound of the electric cart. Or it was our constant conversation. Or it was Sorcha Locke. She’d deliberately led some undead into the zoo, so perhaps she’d led others into this northern suburb of Belfast.

  We’d taken the boxes of food off the handcart, and left them in the alley, before taking the cart to the warehouse to collect the fuel. The electric motor, which made pulling a heavy load easy, also limited our maximum speed. It took an hour to get back to the harbour. It took far longer to get back to the warehouse because of the undead. We had to kill eight near the harbour, and six outside the warehouse itself.

  This was the third, and final, trip. We’d got the cart almost to the harbour, but there were too many zombies. We’d had to turn around and head north, towards Hazelbank Park where we’d left the raft on our way to the zoo. The undead had followed. They might not be as fast as a person, but they’re certainly faster than the electric handcart.

  It had become a running battle. Two miles of hacking and slashing, shooting and stabbing as the zombies drifted out of driveways and side roads. A handful became a dozen. A dozen had swelled to a hundred before we’d reached the shore.

  “Last magazine!” Siobhan called slotting it into place.

  “We’re loaded!” I yelled.

  “Lena, back to the raft. Go!” Kim said as she fired steadily into the milling scrum of death slowly pushing its way forward across the corpses of the fallen. “Siobhan?”

  “Together,” the police officer said. Together, they took a step back, fired, and then took another step. Lena reached the raft. Colm and I dragged it off the beach and down into the bitingly cold water.

  “Get in,” Colm said. Lena clambered aboard. I stayed in the water, watching as the two women fired, stepped back, fired. The zombies came on. Not as many as there’d been before when we’d almost had to abandon the cart and its precious cargo of fuel. Colm had charged them, swinging axe and fist, knocking them down, clearing a path as Kim had emptied a magazine at the legs of the creatures behind. Crippled, they’d fallen. That had slowed the zombies following long enough for us to get the last few hundred feet.

  Kim and Siobhan fired, stepped back, fired.

  “I’m out,” Siobhan said.

  “Run!” Kim said, and together, they turned and ran to the raft. The zombies followed, but they can’t run. The women easily outdistanced the creatures. They ran into the water, and hauled themselves on board. Colm and I dragged the raft out as Kim and Siobhan grabbed oars.

  “Get on,” Kim said.

  With Lena’s help, Colm and I hauled ourselves aboard.

  For a moment, I thought the tide was going to drag us back to the shore, and the sea of snapping mouths staggering down to the beach. Colm grabbed an oar. Lena and I did the same. When we were a hundred feet out, we slowed.

  “They definitely weren’t dying,” Colm said.

  “No, but I’m sure some are,” I said.

  “And why couldn’t it be all of them, all at the same time?” Siobhan asked. “We’ll have to fight our way back to the warehouse just to get the rest of the ammunition so we can shoot all those zombies, just so we can walk safely through the city.”

  “No,” Kim said. “Stay on the ship. At dawn, I’ll go south. I’ll take the launch back to Anglesey.”

  “Not alone,” I said.

  “Not with Dean,” Lena said. “It isn’t saf
e.”

  “Not with Dean,” Kim agreed. “And for the same reason, not with you, Bill. If something does go wrong, I’d like to know you’re safe on that ship.”

  “Relatively safe,” I said.

  She shrugged and picked up her oar. We rowed back to the ship.

  There isn’t much more to say. I feel like there should be. In some ways, today is a moment in history, a day that will be recorded. It is the day we realised the dead are dying. In truth, nothing else has changed. Kallie is unconscious. Not sleeping, but unconscious. If we can’t get fluids into her, she’ll die. We have some of the food we brought back from the zoo, though calling it calories is more accurate than food. Who cares? It’ll keep us alive and that’s all that matters. It won’t save Kallie, though.

  We didn’t bring much ammunition back with us from the warehouse; our priority was the fuel. It shouldn’t take Kim more than two days to get back to Anglesey, and then a third for a boat to reach us. The danger is that Kim will have to spend a night at sea. I’m not concerned that she’ll capsize, but that she’ll drift off course. A few degrees over a hundred miles is the difference between arriving in Holyhead and somewhere along the Welsh coast. It might be a week before help arrives. It might be longer.

  Kim’s asleep right now. I can’t sleep. I don’t think I’ll be able to until we’re all safely back on Anglesey. The zombies are dying. That’s good news, though perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they can die. Even then, is that accurate? Isn’t it just the case that we only really saw one zombie that died? Assuming it did actually die. No, I think it’ll be a long time before I’m able to sleep.

  Chapter 23 - Belfast

  14th October, Day 216

  14:00

  Kim left this morning. She left at dawn. I… I really don’t know how to describe how I feel. It’s worse than when she went to Svalbard. I suppose this is how she must have felt when I disappeared to confront Quigley. Ever since we met, we always seem to be leaving one another. I don’t really want to think about it.

  Lena is making arrows. We’re down to twenty rounds for the MP5, which isn’t going to get us back to the warehouse. I’m not sure arrows will help. It’ll be a hard, hacking slog. I don’t want to think about that, either. We won’t be going back there today. To be honest, I’m grateful. I’m tired. Exhausted. It’s the lack of sleep, I suppose, and the stress of worry. That’s always more tiring that actual danger when you’ve no time to do anything but act or die, and isn’t that a poor choice of words? I suppose it gives an insight into what’s on my mind. Kallie seems to be taking fluids. That’s a nicely medical way of saying that we think she’s swallowing the water we drip into her mouth. If she wasn’t, we’d… I don’t know.