Future's Beginning

by Frank Tayell

  Kim turned around. “I thought I told you to watch the road.”

  “No, Bran told everyone else to do that,” Annette said. “You didn’t say anything about me. So, are they speakers?” She jumped down the ladder and came to join Bran and Kim on the inside of the barricade.

  “They’re speakers, yes,” Kim said looking at the rear of the army lorry. The tailgate was down and the tarp had been pulled back. That had let in leaves and rain, which the wind had sprinkled with snow.

  “Speakers, a generator, an amplifier, and what looks like a laptop,” Bran said. He climbed up the tailgate, and into the rear of the lorry. “The generator’s dry. Laptop’s open.” He swept the icy flakes off the keyboard, and tapped the power key. “Battery’s dead.”

  “They used music to lure the zombies here?” Annette asked. “And the zombies kept coming until the generator ran out of fuel?”

  “The laptop died first, I’d say,” Bran said. “But yes, I think this was a lure, not a trap.” He jumped down, almost losing his footing as he landed. He kicked at the snow. “Casings. 9mm. A few dozen. Maybe a few hundred. Someone stayed long enough to make sure the lure worked.”

  “Can’t see any bodies this side of the barricade,” Kim said. “No weapons either. Hmm, but at the end of the road that… I think that is a barracks.”

  “Hey, look at this,” Annette called. She’d opened the door at the front of the lorry and picked up a folded piece of paper. “It’s a map. A proper one. Look, they’ve marked in the barricades. And the barracks. It is a barracks.”

  “Let me see,” Bran said, as he and Kim walked over to the front of the lorry. “They’ve marked out the barricade by the coal depot and another on the bridge. Hmm. The ship’s crew really should have spotted that. There’s a barricade south of here, on the motorway. Then three, no, four in the town itself.”

  “It’s a ring, isn’t it,” Kim said. “A defensive ring around the barracks.”

  “Looks like it,” Bran said. “Yet this is where they lured the zombies.”

  Annette had climbed back into the cab. “Now we’re talking!”

  “Is it another map?” Kim asked.

  “Better,” Annette said. “It’s chocolate.” She tore the wrapper apart and took a bite. “Hmm. Sour, but I’ve had worse. You want some?”

  “I suppose if you haven’t had food poisoning yet, you’re unlikely to get it now,” Kim said. “I’ll have half, but you can give it to Ken to cover my debt on the bet.”

  “Hey, no, that’s not fair!”

  “Consider it a proxy lesson in the dangers of gambling,” Kim said.

  Annette muttered something that Kim pretended not to hear.

  Bran turned the map over. “They didn’t mark the hospital. I’d say that’s odd.”

  “Because of the zombies we found there?” Kim asked.

  “And because it’s an obvious location to protect,” Bran said.

  “So’s the college,” Annette said. “Because of the wind turbine, I mean. And the hotel, because of its height. They weren’t marked, were they?”

  “No.” Bran put the map away. “I think we should send everybody back.”

  “Send, not lead?” Kim asked.

  “I want to inspect the barricade on the bridge,” Bran said. “The ship’s crew should have spotted it if it’s as sturdy as the barrier they constructed here. Then again, they didn’t spot those cranes by the coal depot. Yes, I think we should send Commander Crawley to take command of The New World.”

  “I like the way you do that,” Kim said. “Couch a command as a suggestion.”

  “It’s a habit of sergeants,” he said. “But if the bridge is secure, then it would be useful to know before we bring more people here.” He glanced up. “That won’t be until tomorrow. No, it would be best to send everyone back. We’re low on ammo. They’re frozen, hungry, and tired.”

  “I’m not,” Annette said, her voice slightly muffled by chocolate.

  “We’ll send Ken and Dee-Dee to look at the bridge,” Kim said. “We’ll send everyone else back to clear the barricade between here and the college. You and I will search the barracks.”

  “And me, too,” Annette said.

  Ken ran his tongue around his mouth. “On balance, I’d say the nuts have gone off. Chocolate’s fine though. We’ll call that a debt paid. You want a bite, Dee-Dee?”

  “Not until I know where the nearest dentist is,” she said. “We’re to go to the bridge, check the other barricade is secure?”

  “That’s it,” Kim said. “You know the route?”

  “Back to the motorway, then left,” Ken said.

  “No, right,” Dee-Dee said.

  “That’s what I meant,” Ken said. “Towards the river.”

  “Here.” Kim gave Dee-Dee the map. “I’m not sure what you’ll find there. The boat’s crew didn’t say they’d seen anything, but, well… find out if there is a barricade, and if it’s where the map says it is, and whether it’ll keep the undead away from this side of the bay. Then come back. Thirty minutes is all you’ve got.”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n,” Dee-Dee said with a grin. “Come on, you,” she added, speaking to Ken. “One more hour and we’ll be back in the warm.”

  “I knew I should have volunteered to help Rahinder and Mirabelle,” Ken said.

  Kim spared another minute watching Dee-Dee and Ken disappear down the road. With the rest of the group having already made their way back along the road, the snow had been churned to slush. When pristine, the lack of footprints had been reassuring, proof that they were the only people to have walked that way since the snowfall. It had offered security. A false security as the frozen undead by the barricade had proved, but security nonetheless. Now it was just a cold and treacherous surface, and they were on the wrong side of Christmas to look forward to the spring.

  She walked back to the barricade, clambered over the anti-ram barrier, and trudged across to the lorry. Annette was still in the cab, the door closed. Kim knocked.

  Annette grinned and opened the door. “Want to come in?”

  “I want you to come out. Oh, you’ve emptied the bag over the seat. Did you find any more chocolate?”

  “No. I found something better,” Annette said. “Two things, actually. First, gloves. They’re dry, and don’t fit me. Here.”

  Kim took them a little hesitantly, but they were obviously too large for the girl. She ripped off her sodden pair, and plunged her hands inside. “That feels good.”

  “Your hand’s bleeding,” Annette said.

  “It’s the cold,” Kim said. “What’s the other thing you found?”

  Annette held up a slim moleskin notebook. “It’s a diary. Well, kind of. It’s all about supplies and who’s on watch, that kind of thing. What’s interesting is… well, you know those Irish survivors? The ones who left those notes in the hotel?”

  “They’re mentioned?”

  “I… I’m not sure. I’d need to look at it again. But I think I was reading their account wrong. It was full of stuff like ‘While we’re waiting, I’ll record how so-and-so died’, or ‘Until we leave, I have more time on my hands than anything except blood. The blood of Colleen Higgins will never come off.’ I won’t forget that one.” She shuddered. “Anyway, the point is that they were waiting for something. I thought it was a person, like Siobhan and Colm. But what if it was a ship? I mean, what if those people out on that path died to protect others as they got aboard?”

  “They were waiting for a ship?”

  “How else do you explain the speakers?” Annette asked. “They lured the zombies here, to their most heavily fortified position. They were basically destroying them. Why? Because they didn’t need the fortifications anymore. If they were going somewhere on land, even to Belfast, they wouldn’t have done that. We wouldn’t have, would we? I mean, okay, there was Brazely Abbey, but we were surrounded, and these survivors weren’t surrounded, not if they had to use the speakers to lure the zombies to the barracks.”


  “Maybe,” Kim said. “But I wouldn’t use what we did in England to predict what a large and heavily armed group of soldiers might have done.”

  “Yeah, but if they did escape, imagine it; they might still be out there somewhere.”

  “Hmm. Come on. Let’s go and help Bran search the barracks.”

  “What does that ‘hmm’ mean?” Annette said. “You disagree, don’t you?”

  They trudged through the snow, following Bran’s single set of prints to the barracks.

  “I think you’re right,” Kim said. “There was a boat, or the promise of a boat, or the hope of it. Maybe they got aboard, or maybe they all died on the waterfront. We may never know.”

  “Right, exactly, so why assume they’re dead?”

  Kim sighed. “That’s not the problem. The problem, the real issue, the real question is whether Dundalk is where they all ended up. Don’t forget the hospital, and the zombies inside there. Did they all come here, all the soldiers and civilians who escaped Dublin? Is this where their story ended?”

  “What if it is? Why is that a problem?”

  “Well, if they did all come here, they brought APCs and ambulances, and thousands of people. Did they bring this gear from Dublin? If so, is there any point in us going there?”

  Chapter 6 - Dead Soldiers

  Aiken Barracks, Dundalk

  The cold bit deep into her face, but Kim left her coat’s hood down and her rifle pressed against her shoulder as they followed Bran’s footsteps from the barricade to the barracks. His were the only set of prints in the snow, but after the shock of seeing the frozen-undead suddenly waking, that was less reassuring than it had been earlier in the day.

  The entrance to Aiken Barracks had been reinforced with sheet metal affixed to the fencing, razor wire attached to the gate, and sandbags stacked neatly around the entrance, leaving a gap only four feet wide.

  “At least there are no zombies,” Annette said. “None living, anyway.”

  There were eight bodies next to the closed gates, all long dead. Remembering the zombies by the barricade, Kim triple-checked that their heads had been crushed. Another pair of undead corpses lay next to the entrance to the cabin-like sentry post. In the doorway itself was a pecked-clean rib cage. There were no other bones. Kim glanced upwards, but couldn’t see any birds, either.

  “But what bird would fly in a snowstorm?”

  “What’s that?” Annette asked.

  “Nothing, just be careful and… and if we have to run, go to the coal depot. You remember that shed, the one with the ladder? Go there, and up the ladder.” It wasn’t much of a refuge, but it was the closest to one they’d seen that day. “Now, cautiously…”

  Bran’s footprints led into the barracks-complex, across what was either a car park or a parade ground, to one of the narrow-windowed, low-roofed buildings on the opposite side of the square. Kim glanced across the rooftops, but couldn’t begin to guess what was inside each building.

  “Bran knows what he’s looking for,” Kim said.

  “So are we going to stand in the cold, waiting for him?”

  “No, we’ll take a look in there,” Kim said, pointing at the building closest to the sentry post. “But—”

  “I know, be ready for danger, be ready to run.”

  The door opened into a security post, two-thirds filled with slim metal boxes. Blank monitors lined two walls, a table occupied a third, and a computer the fourth, with a door next to it leading to a long corridor. There were seven doors leading from that corridor, six on the barracks-side of the compound, with a seventh at the far end. All were closed. Kim took a step back from the doorway, and gave the metal boxes a second glance.

  “Those are ammunition boxes,” she said. Five nearest the door were open. Four were empty. The fifth, though, was nearly full. She picked up a cartridge. “It’s 9mm.”

  “Now, this is a big gun,” Annette said, unfolding the tarp-wrapped object that had been propped on the narrow part of the desk not taken up with the dead security monitors. “Smells of oil.”

  “A machine gun. From an APC, I think,” Kim said. “It looks the same kind that was on that vehicle by the waterfront checkpoint.”

  “There’s ammo for it here,” Annette said, opening one of the boxes on the floor. “At least, I think it’s for that gun. It’s too big for the rifles.”

  “The calibre is on the cartridge, and on the box,” Kim said, scanning the room, then doing it again, this time more slowly. “There are more boxes under the table next to that computer. Check those.”

  “7.62mm,” Annette said, reading the box. “But this box is empty. So is this one. Oh, this box isn’t. It’s full!”

  “Look for 5.56mm,” Kim said. “Let’s hope Ireland used that calibre for their rifles.” She glanced out the window, but there was no sign of Bran. There were no signs of the undead either.

  “There’s more bullets for the machine gun,” Annette said, opening another box.

  “They’re really not much use,” Kim said. “We can’t be accurate enough with a machine gun.”

  “What about grenades?” Annette asked.

  “Don’t touch them!” Kim said. “Where are they?”

  “Here, in this bag beneath the desk,” Annette said. “And I wasn’t going to touch them. I was just seeing what was in the bag.”

  Kim breathed out. “Okay, well, that tells us something, doesn’t it?”

  “It does?”

  “A machine gun and grenades; useful for fighting people, but noisy and inaccurate against the undead. Soldiers would realise that quicker than civilians. That’s why these weapons are here, I think. Left as a last reserve for when they’d run out of ammunition for the more useful weapons. That these are still here confirms what the speakers in that truck suggest. The soldiers set up a lure, and then they escaped.” She pulled closed the door leading outside. “Keep an eye on the parade ground, I want to check those doors off that corridor.”

  “You mean don’t touch anything, I know,” Annette said, but she moved to the window while Kim went to the corridor.

  The first door leading from it was locked. So were the others, except for the room at the far end. It had been an office. More recently, it had been an operating theatre. Bandages coated in brown, dried blood filled an empty wastepaper bin, with more discarded on the floor around it. The table was similarly stained. A chair in the corner held a metal tray with forceps, needles, and probes. Kim frowned. Something didn’t add up. There were no bodies, no bones. No saws, or amputated limbs. She wasn’t sure why she expected those.

  “Something to do with how primitive we’ve become?”

  No, it was something else. The probes. What was there to probe for with a zombie’s bite? She kicked the bin over, then rolled it with her foot, shaking the bandages over the floor until something metallic rolled out: a spent and blood-pocked bullet.

  “Perhaps the machine gun and grenades weren’t being kept for the undead.”

  She scanned the room, looking for some other clues, but there were none to be found.

  “Perhaps it was friendly fire.” Reluctantly, unsatisfied, she headed back to the entrance.

  “There’s nothing for our assault rifles,” Annette said. “But, if the numbers on the outside of the boxes can be believed, there’s about ten thousand rounds for the machine gun, forty thousand 9mm bullets, and a hundred cartridges for the shotgun. Oh, and the grenades.”

  “You should have been watching the parade ground.”

  “I was multi-tasking.”

  Kim let it go. “Forty thousand rounds of 9mm, really?”

  “Yeah. Well, maybe. Hang on. Wait. No, I think I counted wrong. Did I carry the five? I think it’s four thousand. No, that can’t be right, either. Whatever, a lot is missing.”

  “What do you mean, missing?”

  “It’s in the notebook,” Annette said holding up the book she’d taken from the lorry’s cab. “The last entry says they had one hundred and
twenty thousand rounds of 9mm. They must have taken it with them. Or fired it, I guess.”

  “No mention of 5.56mm?”

  “Nope. No mention of the grenades either, so maybe Bran will find rifle ammo somewhere else. But this is good, right? I mean, Sholto only brought us ten thousand rounds and they must have shot a thousand at those zombies by the barricade.”

  “But the bullets are useless unless we have the guns that can fire them,” Kim said. “Even then, they’re not that helpful without a suppressor. There were no guns here?”

  “Just the machine gun and shotgun,” Annette said. “What was in those rooms?”

  “Blood and locked doors,” Kim said.

  “Oh, well maybe that’s where the rest of the bullets are. Shall we check?”

  “We’ll leave them for now; there’s Bran.”

  The soldier trudged across the courtyard towards them. He had his rifle in his arms, a newly found bag over his shoulder, and a weapon slung next to it.

  “Is that a rifle?” Annette asked, when he reached them.

  “A submachine gun,” Bran said. “The collapsible stock is of a kind the Dutch Special Forces preferred. There are a few more weapons in the barracks. Same calibre, same manufacturer, similar design but no two exactly the same. I don’t think they were here before the outbreak. Must have been left by the soldiers. Different soldiers from different units in different nation’s armies.”

  “Did you find more ammunition?” Annette asked.

  “Some. Nothing for our rifles, not there, but it was an improvised bunkhouse with mattresses on the floor. We might have better luck with the armoury, but I don’t think we’ve time to continue the search today.”

  “Any suppressors?” Kim asked.

  “Not that I saw, and I wouldn’t hold out much hope for finding some here,” Bran said. “There were none affixed to the weapons we saw discarded between here and the waterfront. I’m going to ask Rahinder if he can adapt a silencer for one of our rifles to fit a submachine gun.”

  “Mattresses on the floor?” Kim asked. “They were Dutch soldiers?”

  “This submachine gun might be. There were a few French paperbacks and a German Bible, for all that tells us, but it doesn’t tell us that the last people to sleep there were soldiers before the outbreak.”