Future's Beginning

by Frank Tayell

  “It was a quiet docket this morning,” Kennedy said. “Another divorce, but also two requests for marriage licences.”

  “Marriage licences? Oh, that’s good news,” Sholto said.

  “Not for me,” Kennedy said. “I spent half the night trying to remember what they should contain. It has their names, and that of the witnesses. That was sufficient for them, so I think it will be sufficient for us. At least that was a simple problem to solve. Speaking of problems, how goes the search for ships?”

  Sholto didn’t need to look around to know that the off-duty sailors were listening. He chose his words carefully, knowing that what he said would spread quickly around the harbour, but that if he said nothing, it would spread even faster. “I’d say we can be quietly optimistic,” he said. “There are hundreds of sailing and fishing boats on the beaches of Dunkirk, pulled up above the high-tide mark. We think they belonged to people who fled England. Of course, we won’t know if they’re seaworthy until George and Leon get there in a few days.”

  “But what about larger ships?” Fenwick asked. “Ships large enough for all of us.”

  If, before, the room had been quiet enough to hear a pin drop, now it went quiet enough to hear that pin rust.

  “There’s a lot of cloud cover,” Sholto said, stalling to give himself time to think. “So I won’t say anything until the clouds have cleared and we have a few more pictures.”

  “Then you have found something,” Fenwick said.

  “We’ve got to wait on the clouds,” Sholto said. “Even then, we’ll have to wait until George gets there, and Leon still hasn’t reached London. It’ll be four or five days before we know anything for sure. So, with that in mind, there’s work to be done.”

  “You’re off to the airport?” Colm asked.

  “To the industrial site where the fuel tankers are parked, yes,” Sholto said. “We don’t need to go to the airport itself, and won’t unless we’re running ahead of schedule, but that’ll depend on the weather as much as the undead.”

  “Doesn’t it always,” Colm said.

  Within the room, the background noise rose again as the sailors realised that nothing more would be shared. Fenwick seemed to sense that, too. He lowered his voice as he spoke, addressing his sister. “Tell him about the rumour.”

  “It’s nothing,” Kennedy said, giving her brother a glare. “It’s just something I’ve heard a couple of times from suspects and witnesses. I wouldn’t give it any weight.”

  “Well, now I am intrigued,” Sholto said. “What is it?”

  “In that journal of his,” Kennedy said, “your brother wrote that, in Elysium, he’d found a list of safe houses and a set of codes. Pallaskenry was the only safe house he named, but he wrote that there were more. The rumour is that there are enough supplies in these places to keep everyone alive for a century, and that you and the admiral are deliberately not sharing it.”

  “There’s another rumour,” Fenwick said. “Two, actually. One is that you have the list and won’t share it with the admiral. The other is that she’s taken it and won’t share it with anyone else.”

  “Bill should have learned from his time in England,” Sholto said. “He should have stopped writing that wretched journal.”

  “You mean there is a list?” Fenwick said.

  “A list of places just like Pallaskenry,” Sholto said. “According to Locke, they had a few weapons, sometimes a bit of food. It was somewhere for her people to go for a night or two but no longer. I asked her. No, that list can’t help us. Only we can do that.”

  “Which I’ll take as my cue,” Colm said, putting his mug onto an already-full tray. “I wish I was going with you, but Siobhan wanted me to stay here in the harbour while she’s down in Dundalk. I’ve gone over the route with Dean and Lena. You shouldn’t have any trouble, but if you do, I want to hear all about it this evening. Safe journey.” He picked up the tray, nodded, and left.

  “I need to take the evidence to the armoury,” Kennedy said. “That’s something else we should discuss, what evidence and records we need to keep and for how long. I might have had a light docket this morning, but I’ve filled three boxes with papers.”

  “We’ve too much paperwork?” Sholto asked. “That’s the kind of problem I like to have.”

  Sholto went over to his bunk to gather his gear. It was just where he’d left it, but who would steal it? He picked up his rifle, and then his daypack, opening it to check the contents for the third time. Spare magazines, water bottle, torch, rope, collapsible spade, flares, matches, bolt cutters, bandages and glue because they had no other medical supplies. He hadn’t packed any food, but Private Petrelli was collecting that. The most bulky item in the bag was the other, empty bag. That was there in case they came across anything worth looting. And that, really, said it all.

  He had another bag, a duffel containing his worldly possessions, but that was even emptier. It contained a diminishing collection of spare clothes, a few books he’d spent the last thirty years promising himself to one day read, and a few photographs of his newly found family, which he’d taken during that long hot summer. There was an exercise book, too, in which he’d attempted to write an account of his life in America before the outbreak. He’d begun with the happier memories, of the time he’d hitched and hiked to Crossfields Landing, of the summer he’d spent in Portland and the winter he’d spent in Austin. Each time, though, he’d stalled. Each remembered conversation came with the realisation that those he’d known were surely dead. He pushed the duffel bag under his bunk, slung his daypack over his shoulder, and left the warehouse to collect the rest of the expedition.

  Chapter 11 - Lost Friends

  Belfast

  Dean and Lena were waiting on the harbour-side of the checkpoint with Gloria Rycroft. From the way the former actuary was awkwardly holding Lena’s bow, and the way that Dean was trying not to smirk, they were halfway through an archery lesson. Sholto waved and slowed his pace. He’d have preferred Colm as a guide, but if anyone knew how to keep peace on the waterfront, it was the boxer.

  They just needed a couple of days of calm, long enough for Leon to reach London, and then for George and Nilda to reach Calais. Even if the engines on just one ship could be repaired, that might give enough hope, enough confidence, enough calm that the entire community wouldn’t collapse. More personally, it would give Leon time to send a team inland to find Bill. Yes, if they could just hold on for a few more days, if they could find one ship that worked, if the undead remained few, the weather improved, the fish plentiful, and the saboteurs quiet, then they all might live long enough to see Christmas. After that, the struggle would begin again.

  “Are we ready?” Gloria asked.

  Sholto patted his rifle, then his water bottle. “I just need to get my bike. You?”

  Gloria handed the bow back to Lena. “Ready enough.”

  Ostensibly, Gloria Rycroft was joining the expedition to double-check the amount, and thus the weight, of aviation fuel left near the airport. That was a task anyone could do, but Siobhan thought she was reliable, a potential leader in their flattened hierarchy. From what Sholto had seen during the battle on the motorway, he agreed. More pertinently, as Gloria had been in Belfast while the sabotage was taking place on Anglesey, she could be trusted.

  “Where are the others?” Sholto asked.

  “Theo’s gone ahead to check the barricades,” Gloria said. “Luca is collecting our food.”

  Specialist Thelonious Toussaint and Private Luca Petrelli were the military escort for the mission. Really, that was two more than could be spared. The front between the harbour and the mainland was narrow. Their defences incorporated the walls of warehouses, the fences surrounding them, razor wire reclaimed from inside the harbour, cement from the aggregate depot, and rubble from the many ruins. They’d set up checkpoints at the road junctions that, by rights, should be called fortresses, and fitted them with searchlights powered by car batteries. Even so, it required two hund
red personnel on duty at any time, operating in four shifts per day. More were required to act as sentries for the groups gathering firewood, clothing, crockery, and other supplies from Belfast. They were able to reduce that number slightly by sending out daily patrols deep into the city to hunt down the undead that drifted in from the countryside. All told, over a thousand people had taken up arms, and for most it was for the first time since the chaos following the outbreak. They were stretched beyond thin, but they hadn’t seen a great number of zombies since the exodus from Anglesey. Not yet.

  They only had a few minutes to wait for Petrelli. He arrived pushing a bicycle, on which was slung a backpack, the same style as the one Sholto carried. Like the blue and grey trousers and jackets that had become their uniform, the bags had been found during the search of the shipping containers on the John Cabot.

  “Did you get the food?” Sholto asked.

  “Lunch and dinner,” Petrelli said. “Unless we get hungry. Guess what a group ripping up the floorboards in Duncairn Gardens found? Tinned raspberries. My vote is we follow their example and see if we can’t find something similar.”

  “Yeah, that’s not a bad idea,” Dean said. “I’m getting sick of fish and barley.”

  “Malin Head,” Lena said. “Strabane, Enniskillen, Killare, Kilcormac—”

  “Yeah, okay,” Dean said. “I get your point.”

  “What point?” Gloria asked.

  “She’s reminding me of the places where I wished I’d had anything to eat, even fish,” Dean said. “I… I never used to like it.”

  Sholto smiled. There was a lesson he used to give candidates before they’d attempt their first town-hall debate: you can only lead people where they want to go, so make sure to pick their destination before you begin.

  “If we see anywhere promising to loot, we’ll look,” he said. “We need a safe road-route to get the fuel from those tankers back here.”

  “Assuming they’re still there,” Dean said.

  “Assuming that,” Sholto said. “But the tankers were there when they went to collect the plane; who would have moved them since? We need a route we can bring a tanker back, or perhaps a couple of hundred people on bikes, each carrying a jerry can. I don’t know which will be safer, but this is a task that needs to be finished quickly and safely.”

  “One day and done, I like that,” Petrelli said. “What about the helicopters?”

  “We’re to take photographs of the engines.” He hesitated, but he could see no purpose in hiding the truth, certainly not from these people whom he trusted. “We’ve found a ship or three in France. Whether they’ll still work is another matter. On the photographs, there are a couple of helicopters, too. We might only need spares and fuel from near the airport, though we’re at least five days away from when we’ll have people in France who can perform a manual inspection. Either way, we will need the fuel. Everyone ready? We should reach the tankers by one o’clock, and be back here by five. It’s only a forty-mile round trip, and the rain seems to have washed away the snow. Assuming there isn’t too much ice, we should make good time, and have some to spare for looting, but only if we don’t dawdle. Let’s move out.”

  “Hang on a bit,” Petrelli said. “I just need the latrine.”

  Ten minutes later, and already behind schedule, they met Specialist Toussaint at the checkpoint itself. The ten guards were alert, watching every direction except the harbour. The corpses of the undead had been pushed aside, clearing a route for the scavengers and patrols going into Belfast, but there were too many corpses to bury. Each day, despite the patrols that walked the distant streets at the city’s far boundaries, more zombies found their way to the noisy, bustling harbour. Each day someone was injured, though usually in the course of normal labour. Every few days, someone would die, occasionally from injuries sustained during combat with the undead, but usually due to the long-term effects of radiation poisoning, or from a mundane infection, untreatable without antibiotics. It was a slow attrition that had begun in the summer, and for which the handful of births couldn’t compensate.

  The harbour was doomed, but Sholto had known that within a few hours of arriving. If it wasn’t for the sabotage, he… he wasn’t sure what they would have done, or where they would have gone. Perhaps he’d have taken the plane, but perhaps Scott Higson would have refused to fly. Perhaps the admiral’s plan would have carried the day and they’d have gone to Connemara. But they would have exchanged the dangers of the undead for islands with scant cover and fewer resources. Did that make Kim right about living aboard ships? Would that life be any better? Wasn’t it just kicking the can down the road, drifting from one wild scheme to the next, hoping to hold everyone together long enough for the undead to die, for spring to come, and for some miraculous future to arrive? Perhaps, but perhaps the lesson of the last nine months was that that was all they could hope for.

  They reached Duncairn Gardens and got a resentful glare from the work-gangs ripping up the last of the floorboards. It was work that had to be done. They needed fuel for heat, for cooking, for boiling water, and had already consumed the meagre stores of coal and peat found in the city. They sorely needed the coal from Dundalk, but at least finding firewood kept people occupied during the day and exhausted at night. Without the work, would boredom set in? Would that then turn to resentment, and then to revolution? It was made worse by the guards, dressed in their blue and grey uniform while the work gang were dressed in the looted clothes they’d recently found. They looked more like prisoners than volunteers. And they were volunteers. There were some in the harbour who refused to do any work. Even Leo Fenwick had joined those advocating issuing food for work, but that would only precipitate a mutiny.

  “Policy is easy,” Sholto muttered. “It’s implementation that’s hard.”

  “What’s that?” Gloria asked.

  “I was just reminding myself why I never became a candidate,” Sholto said.

  They soon left Duncairn Gardens behind. Cliftonville Road became Oldpark Road. They went down Ballysillan, then up Ligoniel. The roads were mostly ice-free, but as the snow had melted, it had washed the mud to the gutters. With the drains long since blocked, the roadside was flooded, while the median, now clean of dirt and debris, was revealed to be cracked and potholed.

  Outside a three-aisle supermarket, they paused so Petrelli could find a tree. They didn’t need to go inside the store to know it had been looted down to the shelves. A quarter mile beyond that, on the very outskirts of the city, they saw their first zombie of the day.

  The creature’s lurid pink shorts were a bright contrast to the sloughing grey skin of its legs. Its shoeless feet splashed through the puddle of icy snowmelt. Rivulets of rain had cut deep fissures through the season of mud coating its chest, exposing a checkerboard of unhealed cuts beneath. Its face was a rotting death mask of paper-thin skin, broken teeth, and sightless eyes. It was, in short, pitiful. Not even when it lurched towards them, arms swinging, did he know even the briefest moment of fear.

  They’d all stopped at the sight of the zombie. Dean and Lena had drawn their bows, but Petrelli looked to Toussaint, while the specialist looked to Sholto for the order to expend a precious bullet. Before he could tell them to save the ammunition, Dean fired. His arrow sung through the air faster than Sholto’s eye could follow, sinking deep into the creature’s chest. The zombie staggered a pace sideways before continuing on.

  “It’s the bike,” Dean said. “I can’t fire from the saddle.”

  As he finished speaking, Lena let loose. She’d been an archer before the outbreak, a local hero the community hoped to send to the Commonwealth Games. Feathers sprouted from the zombie’s skull as her arrow broke bone and pierced its brain.

  “Show-off,” Dean said. Lena gave a nonchalant shrug.

  “That zombie wasn’t dying,” Petrelli said. “By the look of it, it should have been.”

  “Give it a couple of months more,” Sholto said. “So, Dean, where are we?”

/>   “That’s Divis up there,” Dean said.

  “What’s Divis?” Toussaint asked.

  “The mountain,” Lena said, pointing westward beyond the row of narrow terraced houses.

  “Those are the Belfast Hills,” Dean said.

  “Are there roads running through them?” Petrelli asked. “Because we’d see the zombies coming for miles from up there.”

  “And have nowhere to hide,” Gloria said. “Personally, and this is just me, but I vote we stick to the firmer roads, shortest route, and fastest way back.”

  “There are tracks and paths up in the hills,” Dean said. “That’s what Colm said. Probably not wide enough for a truck. That’s why we’ll take the Ballyutoag Road around the hills.”

  “Where’s that?” Toussaint asked, taking out his map.

  “The A52,” Lena said.

  “Ah. So we follow that to Nutts Corner,” Toussaint said, running a finger along the crumpled map. “Then head up to the airport. And coming back?”

  “We’ll take the scenic route,” Sholto said. “To whit, we’ll cut east then south, following whichever country roads aren’t blocked by trees and mud.”

  Lena raised her still-strung bow, tapping Dean’s arm with it.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Elizabeth Rosen,” Lena said.

  “Who’s that?” Sholto asked.

  “A girl at school,” Dean said. Lena extended her bow, pointing at a small windowed three-up, two down.

  “That was her place?” Sholto asked. “I thought you went to school in the south of the city.”

  “Lizzy moved a few years ago,” Dean said. “But she was with us when we left the gym. You know, after the outbreak. She… she…”

  “She disappeared,” Lena said.

  “Yeah,” Dean said. “She was there with us in the morning when we left, but… but then she wasn’t. No one saw her go or anything. Just one minute she was there, the next, she was gone.”

  Sholto checked his watch. “It’s still early and we’re making good time.” He kicked the stand out for his bike and left it propped on the road. “Keep watch, I’ll take a look.”