Future's Beginning

by Frank Tayell

  “Why d’you do that?” Gloria asked.

  “Here we stand,” Sholto said, “and I want some room to swing.”

  Siobhan fired. A zombie fell, leaving only two other undead creatures lurching along the road. She fired again.

  “I’m out,” she said.

  Gloria fired. The last zombie fell.

  “Anyone got any spare ammo?” Siobhan said. “Then who’s got a rifle but never fired it before they arrived here? Right, give me your weapon. Thanks.”

  “What a day,” Gloria said. “I—” But her words were lost in the sound of an explosion, then another, both coming from the south.

  “Fenwick!” Gloria said.

  “No,” Sholto said calmly. “No, that’s us. Someone else had the same idea as me. It’s claymores and C-4, that’s all.”

  “You think?” Gloria said.

  “I’m certain,” Sholto said with a confidence he didn’t truly feel.

  “So am I,” Siobhan said. “It’s to the south, away from the ships. The noise will draw the zombies there.”

  “Is that the signal, then?” Gloria asked.

  “If it is, Reg will come back to tell us,” Sholto said. “We hold this line. Everyone else will be holding theirs.”

  He hoped.

  Visibility improved as the wind grew, sucking smoke high up into the sky. It was sucking the flames up, too, creating a towering wall of roaring orange-black death. They didn’t need their torches now, as the inferno brought a mockery of dawn, turning night into day eight hours too early. A spark landed on the plastic chairs, then another. Sholto ignored them, focusing on the jumble of shadows, moving and undulating as the inferno grew upward and spread outward. A larger ember landed on the wooden table. He reached forward, brushing it away. When he looked down the road, he saw a moving line of fire, heading towards them. No, not a line of fire.

  “Zombies,” he said. “Zombies! On fire.”

  The creatures lurched closer. Inhuman torches, barely recognisable walking pillars of flame. Eight, no, ten. Twelve. Then eleven as one collapsed. Another fell, then a third, but the others came on.

  “Hold,” Sholto said. “Hold!”

  Siobhan fired. A creature tumbled, still burning into the gutter. Another collapsed, this time without a shot being fired. A memory came to him, one he never consciously tried to remember, that of a motel at the beginning of this nightmare.

  “Here we stand,” he said. “We can do no more.”

  “We won’t have to,” Siobhan said. “The fire’s doing our job for us. It’s killing them.”

  “Not quickly enough,” Gloria said.

  Siobhan fired a shot from her borrowed rifle, felling a zombie that was staggering ahead of the others. It collapsed, still burning, in the middle of the road.

  Overhead came another sound.

  “Is that the helicopter?” Gloria asked. Even Sholto looked up, but he couldn’t see it. All too quickly, the high-pitched buzz receded into the night.

  “It’s gone to Dundalk,” Sholto said, turning back to the road. The zombies were all down. Either shot, or burned even beyond the ability of the virus to re-animate.

  “Is that the sign?” Gloria asked.

  “Not yet,” Sholto said.

  “What if everyone has fallen back,” a sailor asked. “What if the zombies are already behind us? What if they killed Reg?”

  “No,” Sholto said. “We do our job, and trust everyone else will do the same. That’s how we survive, today, tomorrow, and long enough to see next year.”

  A zombie staggered out of the once-again growing smoke. Its legs were alight, with more flames flickering from its scalp. Siobhan fired.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I’m out.”

  “Two more minutes,” Sholto said, eying the flames. “Two more minutes, then we go.”

  There were footsteps behind them, then an out-of-breath shout.

  “It’s me. It’s me!” Reg called. “Ammo,” he said, holding out a bag. “Not much. All we can spare.”

  “We’re not retreating?” Gloria asked.

  “The ship’s horn,” Reg said, still breathless. “Listen for the horn. Calling people back. The admiral.”

  “Take your time,” Sholto said. “But I think we’ve got the message. Pass the ammo out.” He took a magazine for himself, and watched the road.

  Reg took a breath, then another, and then coughed. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m okay. The admiral’s almost finished loading the ships. She said to hold until you heard the horn.”

  “When will that be?” a sailor asked.

  “Not long,” Reg said.

  “I don’t think it matters,” Siobhan said, as she lowered the rifle. “Not even a zombie will make it through the blaze now. Ten minutes, and the flames will reach us. Less if the wind changes.”

  “Then go. All of you. I’ll hold the line here,” Sholto said.

  “Nah,” Gloria said. “Not after today. No, I’m seeing this through to the end. What was it you said? Here we stand. Well, I’d rather stand here, where I can see danger come than on the dockside in the dark.”

  “At least it’s warm here,” Reg said. “First time I’ve been properly warm since Anglesey.”

  “That’s it, Reg,” Gloria said. “Always look on the bright side.”

  “Nice,” Sholto said, “but—”

  A foghorn rent the air.

  “That’s the signal,” Gloria said.

  Sholto took one last look at the road, then, gratefully, ran with the others, back to the waterfront.

  Chapter 22 - A Liar’s Confession

  Belfast Harbour

  A barrier had been thrown up on the roads by the infirmary. Like the hasty constructs they’d pulled together between the warehouses, it might slow the undead, but it wouldn’t stop them. Made of highly flammable wood and plastic, it wouldn’t even slow the inferno. The admiral stood ramrod-rigid behind the barricade, her tense-looking bodyguard of old-hands behind her, with Colm by her side. He didn’t look tense, just tired.

  “You all here?” Colm asked, counting each of the rear guard off as they climbed over the barrier. “Yes. Good. Off you go, then. There’s a launch ready to take you out to the John Cabot.”

  “How many more people are you waiting on?” Sholto asked as Gloria and the others headed through. He and Siobhan hung back.

  “You’re the last,” the admiral said.

  Colm held out a dog-eared piece of paper. “Everyone who went out has come back, I can promise you that. I can’t promise everyone who was here this morning is now on the ships, though. Boarding was too chaotic.” As he spoke, a trace of anxiety slipped into his voice.

  “We have everyone,” the admiral said. “No one would choose to stay behind.”

  “The inferno has stopped the zombies,” Sholto said. “They’re pushing through the ruins, the barricades, and into the harbour, but they’re alight, burning up, dying.”

  “Yes, we heard,” the admiral said. “I dispatched the helicopter to Dundalk, but from the air, they reported that the fire had engulfed the harbour entrance. There is a wall of flame between us and the city.”

  “The motorway will stop the blaze,” Colm said. “The flooded streets will do the rest. Belfast will survive.”

  “Perhaps,” the admiral said. “But we won’t, unless we depart now. We’re cut off from the city. If the wind changes, we’ll have less than twenty minutes. Even if it doesn’t, we don’t have much more than half an hour. There’s no time to gather more food, or collect more supplies. It’s over.”

  “Which ship is Fenwick on?” Sholto asked.

  “He isn’t,” the admiral said. “He’s in the cage, behind the infirmary. I was keeping him ashore until the last minute.”

  “I’ll get him,” Sholto said. “Siobhan, have you got that phone? The one you were using to gather evidence?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Can I have it? Thanks.” Before anyone could ask any other questions, h
e jogged away, to the rear of the infirmary.

  Luca Petrelli was on guard outside.

  “Are you alone?” Sholto asked.

  “Theo’s inside,” Petrelli said. “Are we leaving?”

  “We are. I just want a few minutes with the prisoner.”

  “Aye, sir.” Petrelli stepped aside.

  Inside, Toussaint sat on the desk. Fenwick was in the cage.

  “Specialist, go wait outside,” Sholto said.

  Toussaint looked at Sholto, then the prisoner. “Do you want the keys?”

  At that, Fenwick stiffened.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Sholto said. “I’ll need five minutes. Give me a shout if the fire gets too close.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Toussaint handed over the keys to the cage, and headed for the door. Sholto waited until he was outside, then picked up the lamp from the desk. It was the only light in the room. He walked over to the prisoner.

  Fenwick was handcuffed, with a chain around his ankles, standing in the cage that still reeked of Markus’s vomit.

  “Quite a comedown from this morning,” Sholto said.

  “Why are you doing this?” Fenwick asked. “I… I didn’t do anything.”

  “There’s no point lying,” Sholto said. “Your sister confessed before she tried to shoot me. She’s dead, but we recorded that confession.”

  “I don’t know what she said, but it’s not true,” Fenwick said.

  “Save it, we don’t have time,” Sholto said. “The fire’s spreading fast. It’ll be here in about twenty minutes, and we’ll be long gone. You’re not coming with us.”

  “You’d leave me to burn to death? Don’t I even get a trial?”

  “Nope. There’ll be no trial. What would be the point? With the confession from your sister, the jury’s findings are a foregone conclusion. You’re guilty, but right now, you do have a small measure of leverage.”

  Fenwick stiffened. “What?”

  “There are a few questions I didn’t get to ask your sister. Here’s the deal, answer them and I’ll let you go. Like I said, you aren’t coming with us. If you want to avoid burning to death, you’ll have to swim. Even if you don’t drown, the speed the fire’s spreading, there’s a good chance the blaze will reach the opposite shore before you do. There’s an even better chance the zombies will kill you if you make it to dry land, but it is a chance. It’s a chance you didn’t give your victims. The alternative isn’t a noose. In about four and a half minutes, Specialist Toussaint will return, and I’ll leave, and I’ll leave you locked in that cage. Understand? So don’t waste time with protestations of innocence, no prevarication.” He took out the pistol he’d taken from Kennedy. “Recognise this?” he asked, ejecting the magazine.

  Fenwick looked between the gun and Sholto, then back to the gun. He didn’t speak.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Six bullets left in the magazine, one in the chamber. For each lie, I’ll remove a bullet. If I remove them all, or if the specialist returns, you’ll stay here in chains. Answer honestly, and I’ll leave you the gun and the bullets. I’ll give you the chance you never gave any of your victims. Understand? First question: which of you shot Willis?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fenwick said.

  Sholto ejected the cartridge from the chamber, and put it in his pocket. He placed the gun on the table, and picked up the magazine. “Which of you shot Willis?”

  The lamplight was dim and diffused, but it was bright enough to illuminate Fenwick’s eyes as they darted from the pistol on the desk to the magazine in Sholto’s hand. “She did,” Fenwick said, adding quickly, “I don’t know what she told you, but she did.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “My sister. She killed Willis and his people. It was her idea.”

  “That I believe,” Sholto said. “Why didn’t you shoot Markus?”

  “She… she liked poison,” Fenwick said. “She always liked poison. That’s how she killed her husband. I didn’t know about that, not until after the outbreak. If I had, I’d have gone to the police. I would.”

  “She killed her husband?”

  “Years ago. That wasn’t her only victim. I didn’t know. Not until after the outbreak.”

  That begged a dozen more questions, but the answers would only give a more complete picture of a criminal who was now dead.

  “Rachel?” he asked, deciding to let Fenwick’s desperate guilt supply the specifics of the question.

  “Nicola knew her from before the outbreak,” Fenwick said.

  Sholto pried the top-most cartridge free.

  “I knew her. Okay. Yes. I knew her.” Fenwick said.

  Inwardly, Sholto smiled. Fenwick had broken far more quickly than he’d expected, but that still didn’t leave him with much time.

  “The claymores, why did you take those?”

  “That was Willis’s idea. People know what a mine looks like.”

  “Why did he have to die?”

  “Because we’re all going to America,” Fenwick said.

  “He was a loose end?”

  “No. Yes, but no. He didn’t need to die. Humanity has been saved, you see? That’s what this was about. It was about saving the human race. On Anglesey, we were dying one by one. We stood no chance making Belfast habitable, that was obvious. Everyone was going to die, but they didn’t have to. The zombies are dying, don’t you see? In a few months, it’ll be a year since the outbreak. They’ll be dead. What are we doing except wasting our time? We have to look to the future.”

  “By killing everyone?”

  “No. Not everyone. We have to think of the future of our species. I mean, that’s what my sister believed. She learned it from Dr Singh. The zombies are dying. Soon they’ll be dead. Then what? Then where? The shadow of a nuclear power station in Wales is hardly the place to rebuild civilisation.”

  Sholto pried another cartridge loose. “It could have been. How many others are there?”

  “There’s no one.”

  He extracted another round from the magazine. “How many others?”

  “No one, I swear. She hired Willis. She tried to hire Rachel, but Rachel always had plans of her own, always wanted to be in charge. Always.”

  “And Bishop?”

  “That had nothing to do with us,” Fenwick said. “That was Rachel. It was all her.”

  “But you knew what she was doing. You knew what Bishop was doing.”

  “No.”

  Sholto took another round out of the gun. “You’re running out of bullets, running out of time.”

  “We didn’t know the specifics. Okay, okay, we didn’t care. Just like we didn’t care what Markus was doing. It was always about the species as a whole. It was about the big picture.”

  “Right. What happened to my bag?”

  “What?”

  Sholto pried another cartridge out of the gun. “My bag. What happened to it?”

  “I… it went into the sea.”

  “I had some photos in there,” Sholto said. “Why did you take it?”

  “We wanted those codes, the codes for Kempton’s bunker.”

  “The codes were for the satellites, and they were never in my bag,” Sholto said. “Last question. When did this begin?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I’m asking,” Sholto said. “Confess. Admit to what I know, then you get the gun and the key.”

  “You mean… you mean about Dr Singh?”

  “No. You killed him, too? Huh. No, I want to know when this began.”

  “You mean the power plant? That was all Willis. It was his idea. Create a crisis, then provide a solution.”

  That was obviously a lie. It didn’t matter. Whether the idea had originated from Fenwick or Kennedy, Willis or Rachel, or even Paul or Bishop, the result was the same. They had been working to destroy Anglesey for months. They had ruined humanity’s best chance of survival, and then killed one another, and killed so many more along the
way, all so they could be king of a dung heap, a ruler with an empire of one. What mattered, all that mattered, was that Fenwick was the last.

  “Is there anything else you want to say?” Sholto asked. “Anything else to confess?”

  “It was always her,” Fenwick said. “I tried to stop her, I did.”

  “Step back from the door,” Sholto said. “Move.”

  Fenwick shuffled back from the cage door. Sholto unlocked it.

  “Step forward,” he said.

  Fenwick took a step towards him, holding out his shackled hands. Sholto ignored them, reached up, and tore the bandage from the side of the man’s face.

  “You got that in the warehouse?”

  “It was a bottle,” Fenwick said.

  “Looks like a cut to me,” Sholto said. “A straight-line cut. The kind you’d get from a knife, not a bottle. Why did you go to the warehouse?”

  “Because of the rioting. I… I…” He stumbled into silence, uncertain what lie to give.

  “You went there to make sure Markus was dead.”

  “No. I… I was trying to calm things down.”

  “Hold out your hands,” Sholto said.

  Fenwick extended his hands, wrists forward.

  “No, I said hold them out,” Sholto said. “Palms upwards.” He reached into his coat and took out the phone. The voice recorder was still on, but he switched to the photographs taken earlier that day, skipping back until he found the image of the fingerprint on the knife. He turned on the phone’s light, and shone it on Fenwick’s hands. There was a scar on the index finger of his right hand. Sholto checked the photograph of the print Siobhan had taken from the knife. The void on the print matched the scar.

  “You went into the warehouse to kill Markus,” Sholto said. “I don’t think you were expecting a riot. I wonder if your sister was. Did she send you on that task? You said she knew her poisons? She knew what to put in that wine to make sure a riot would start, yes? Yes. She could have poisoned the wine with something that would simply have made every drinker soporific, and then dead. Instead she wanted a brawl so that you would die, too. You were another loose end, Leo, weren’t you?”

  “No,” Fenwick said.

  “You were supposed to die, and she, the grieving sister, the judge, would have been left to rule. You went into the warehouse with instructions to make sure Markus was dead.”