by Frank Tayell
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.”
He paused by the house’s front door, and knocked his crowbar against the wood. He had a machete at his belt, but the blade was too much like a sword, and that was too archaic for his tastes, emphasising how much was yet to be lost. There were footsteps behind him. Dean and Lena had followed him across the swamp-like front garden. “You don’t need to come inside,” he said.
“Nah, it’s fine,” Dean said. “This isn’t the first time we’ve gone looking for… well, for people we know.”
“It’s too narrow inside for bows,” Sholto said. Though he doubted anyone, or anything, was inside. He was right.
Upstairs, the cupboard doors were open. Discarded clothing lay rotting on the bed.
“She must have come back for clothes or something,” Dean said. “That’s got to be it. That’s why she left. She came back for something, thinking she could catch up.”
“When you left the gym, you were heading to Lough Neagh, weren’t you?” Sholto asked. “That’s what Colm told me.”
“Yeah, Kallie had this idea about the Lough. That we’d be safe on boats or something,” Dean said. “We didn’t get there.”
“So you came down this road?”
“Not this road,” Dean said. “I… I’m not sure what roads we took. I’m not sure we knew when even then. We just…”
“We just kept moving,” Lena said.
“And we should do the same now,” Sholto said.
It was impossible to know whether Elizabeth Rosen had returned to her home, but nor was there any proof that she’d died. Dean and Lena would have that hope to replace guilt over her loss, for whatever succour that offered.
Back outside, the private was missing.
“Where’s Petrelli,” he asked.
“Behind the tree,” Gloria said.
“Is he okay?” Sholto asked Toussaint.
The specialist shrugged. “Ask a doctor, but we can’t do that until we get back.”
“Any more zombies?” Sholto asked.
“Nothing but the birds,” Gloria said. “Or a bird. A robin came and pecked at the mud we disturbed. Must be worms down there.”
“No zombies?” Dean said. “Do the patrols come out this far?”
“No,” Toussaint said. “They stay within two miles of the harbour.”
“Then maybe we got them all,” Dean said.
Lena raised her bow, pointing to the dead zombie in the lurid shorts.
“Most of them, then,” Dean said.
“My advice,” Toussaint said. “The advice I got from every decent NCO I served with, is to assume the enemy is behind bush and tree until you’re back behind your lines. Speaking of trees…”
Petrelli ran back onto the road.
“Let’s move out,” Sholto said.
Chapter 12 - Bags
Nutts Corner, Co. Antrim
In one fluid movement, Lena’s feet hit the ground and she flipped her already strung bow from around her chest. She drew and notched an arrow before Sholto had pulled on his brakes. He spotted the waving branch just as the zombie staggered out of the shallow treeline, onto the road, and straight into the path of her arrow.
“I didn’t even see it,” Petrelli said, clearly impressed.
Lena shook her head, though not at his comment. “We shouldn’t have come this way,” she said.
“Why not?” Sholto asked, dismounting from his bike.
“We’re having a breather?” Gloria asked. “Wonderful! Dodging the potholes reminds me of riding through Clapham Common; I’d forgotten how draining cycling could be.”
“If we’re taking a break,” Petrelli said. He didn’t finish the sentence, but kicked out his stand, dismounted, and hurried towards a bush.
“Check for zombies, first!” Toussaint called in a deliberately loud voice, but all was still, the loudest sound that of water running slowly along the ditch.
“Why shouldn’t we have come this way?” Sholto asked. “We’re still on the A52, aren’t we?”
“No, we’re where we want to be,” Dean said. “That’s Nutts Corner up ahead.”
“And that’s the roundabout?” Gloria asked, looking at the map. “Then the southern edge of the airfield is about three kilometres to the northwest. We’ve got two routes we can take from the roundabout. We can continue north along the A52 until… until… well, for about two kilometres until we get to a road that doesn’t seem to have a name, but we’ll approach the airport from the south.”
“That’s Crosshill Road,” Lena said.
“Right,” Gloria said. “Or, from here we go north up the A26 and approach the airport from the east.”
“Which is why I thought this was a good route,” Dean said. “The fuel tankers are parked in that industrial site off Crosshill Road. We’ll pass them on our way to look at the helicopters.”
Lena shook her head again.
“Why shouldn’t we have come this way?” Sholto asked.
“The supermarket,” Lena said.
“Yeah, well, I thought we might have time to look inside,” Dean said.
“What supermarket?” Sholto asked.
“It’s just up ahead,” Dean said. “More or less on the southern edge of the roundabout. We came by here, back after the outbreak. Someone was already there, you know, looting. They chased us away.”
“They shot at us,” Lena said.
“Yeah, but they won’t be there now,” Dean said. “Maybe they left some of the food. You said we could do a bit of scavenging if we had time.”
“I’m not sure that we do,” Sholto said. “We’re already an hour and a half behind schedule. The roads are more pothole than tarmac, and as much ice as asphalt. It’s not that I begrudge having stopped at Elisabeth Rosen’s house, but we wasted nearly an hour at that industrial unit.”
“An hour, thirty rounds, and ten arrows,” Gloria said.
“All for the discovery of a heating-oil depot whose tanks were already empty,” Sholto said.
“But that was the most zombies we’ve seen today,” Dean said. “And they were all trapped behind that gate. I think most of the zombies around here ended up in Belfast, and we’ve killed them. Any others will be like those at the industrial unit, trapped behind gates and fences.”
“Gates can break,” Gloria said.
“Exactly,” Dean said. “Killing them today will save us time when we come back for the tankers. And how long will it take us today to read some figures off the tanker’s fuel gauge?”
“A good point,” Sholto said. “Let me see the map again. Right. Hmm. Well, we’re unlikely to find a road in a better state than this one. The vast majority look narrower, more winding, more likely to be washed out or blocked by fallen trees and collapsed hedges. Despite our good fortune with the undead today, we can’t assume that we’ll be this lucky when we bring the tankers back. We’ll need to plan for detours and take the time to clear the route. I’m mindful of what happened when we were clearing the motorway so the plane could land. No, this is the best road we’ll find today, and I wouldn’t want to drive a laden fuel-tanker along it, not with so much of it flooded that it barely qualifies as a single-lane. We’ll have to take the fuel back to the harbour by bike.”
“You sure, sir?” Toussaint asked.
“Are you volunteering to drive a tanker along that road?” Sholto replied.
“Never volunteer, sir, that’s the second lesson they teach you. But we’ll need a few hundred people to carry the same volume of fuel as one tanker. That’ll be as noisy as a vehicle’s engine.”
“Do we have that many bikes?” Dean asked.
“In Belfast?” Lena replied.
“Right, yeah, okay,” Dean said.
Sholto took one last look at the map. “Neither option is ideal, and both are fraught with danger, but I think bicycles will be
quicker. Certainly, it’ll be quicker to organise. We can have the job done by tomorrow night. Since we’ll need a secure location in case something goes wrong, why not spare a half hour to investigate that supermarket.”
When Petrelli returned, they walked their bikes slowly to the roundabout. Though they were alert for the living or the undead, they only saw a solitary raven perched on a sign. Since that sign was pointing down Dundrod Road towards the supermarket, Sholto took it as an omen. He wasn’t sure what to take from the bodies lying in the road leading to the car park.
“They were people, not zombies,” Gloria said.
“Pecked nearly clean,” Petrelli said, as Toussaint picked up the submachine gun lying half-buried in the mud.
“East-German made,” the specialist said. “Back in the late 1960s, I think. Magazine’s empty.” He let the weapon fall. It clattered to the road. The raven cawed.
“The bird’s looking for its next meal,” Dean said.
“But these people didn’t die recently,” Gloria said. “So what has the raven been eating in the months since?”
“Theo, you’re with me,” Sholto said. “We’ll take a quick look inside. Everyone else, watch the road. Keep the bikes ready for a hasty escape.”
Considering the relative remoteness of the location, the supermarket was surprisingly large. A thin mulch of leaves covered the scattered bones leading down the access road to the car park. The raven overtook them, landing on the wide roof of the warehouse-like store. Toussaint’s rifle moved left and right, down and straight ahead as he swept their approach.
“Do you see those station wagons?” the specialist said. “How the trunks are open, facing the supermarket’s entrance? It’s the way you’d park if you came here expecting to make a quick getaway. Clearly, they didn’t leave.”
Sholto kicked at a stray, label-less can lying on the road. It rolled a few inches before coming to a halt. The can was full. He crossed to the station wagon and rapped his hand against the rusting door as his eyes fell on the skull at his feet. There was no sign of the torso, but the bone had been pecked nearly clean. Only a few tufts of hair remained attached to a solitary patch of scalp at the temple.
“Looks intact. Probably human, not zombie,” he said.
“There’s food in the trunk,” Toussaint said. “Three trays of… of broad beans, I think. About sixty cans.” He picked up a tattered fragment of label. “Three hundred and fifty grams per can. What’s that in real money? About four portions per can?”
“Depends on the size of the portion, I suppose,” Sholto said.
“Before I enlisted, I worked in a grocery store,” Toussaint said.
“Oh yes?” Sholto asked, turning from the vehicles to look at the entrance.
“Can’t say it was the reason I joined up, can’t say it made me second-guess my decision. Reckon these cans were on special offer, on display near the doors. Old stock, they were trying to clear out. There’s a date on the tray. April. Two months after the outbreak.”
“Might still be edible, then,” Sholto said.
One of the wide glass doors was lodged open; the other was smashed, as were the windows next to it. On the ground in front lay a dozen spent shotgun cartridges and a discarded sabre, pitted with rust.
Sholto took out his torch and unclipped his crowbar as Toussaint slotted his light onto his carbine. Inside, they found more evidence of a long-ago battle. Shelving units were wedged around and between the registers, creating individual forts. Each was ringed by the slowly decaying corpses of the undead. Inside those last-ditch defences were the remains of a defender. In two cases, they were undead; in three, they were the picked-clean remains of the immune.
“The zombies are dead,” Sholto said. “Someone came back to finish them.”
“Maybe the people who chased Dean and Lena away,” Toussaint said, shining torch and carbine deeper into the store. “They found too much here to carry, went in search of cars. Found the station wagons, but the sound of the engines summoned more of the undead. Some people fled, the rest tried to fight, to protect their haul. They died. Those that fled returned, finishing their undead friends, but didn’t want to risk taking the cars. That lesson learned, they took what they could carry and ran.”
“Maybe.” Sholto picked up a double-barrelled shotgun, and cracked it open. The cartridges inside had been spent. “But did it happen before Locke left Belfast? Was it before Jasmine Cotter arrived there? Is she the answer to the question of what happened to the people who survived this fight?” He dropped the shotgun on the counter. In reply, came a rattle of metal from deeper within the supermarket.
Toussaint aimed gun and torch into the gloom. Light glinted off broken glass and fractured metal, marking where shelves had been pulled down in someone’s last attempt to escape. The sound came again, from beneath the fallen shelves, growing louder as they approached, but then abruptly stopped. Sholto shone the light down and onto the creature. It lay buried beneath the thin metal, one arm extended, the hand clawing towards the light. Its mouth hung open, seemingly unable to close.
“I think it’s dying,” Sholto said. He clipped the crowbar back on his belt; there wasn’t room to swing. Instead, he drew his long hunting knife and plunged it down through the creature’s eye-socket. “Not that it means much. Dying doesn’t mean dead.” He gave the fallen shelves a kick. Silence came back from inside. “What do you think, are there more?”
“Hard to say, so I’ll assume yes,” Toussaint said. “There’s some bottles here. Lime and… and what kind of fruit ends with an ‘n’? Lemon? Too much of the label is missing. The contents will be mostly sugar, but there might be a vitamin or two in there.”
Sholto played his light along the aisle. “There’s a lot of stock still here. Might be worth checking the back. Perhaps we can find something to enliven our lunch. I’m sure there’s a rule that says people who go out into the wilds get first choice of what they find.”
“We’ll run out of time,” Toussaint said.
“Not if we split up,” Sholto said. “We don’t all need to go up towards the airport. You take Gloria and Lena. I’ll keep Dean and Petrelli. Hmm, looks like some toilet paper still on that shelf. I doubt the private will mind staying in one place for a few hours. Go to the tankers, check the fuel level, and take the photographs for the admiral. You know what to look for. Then do the same for the helicopters. Half an hour in each place, then come back here. I’ll see if we can get a fire going. We might as well check some of this food is still edible.”
“Right. Sure,” Toussaint said, distracted. “So, listen, do you really think we’ll get a helicopter flying again? In time, I mean.”
“In time for what?” Sholto said.
“Before we leave for America.”
“I don’t know when that’ll be,” Sholto said.
“A few weeks is what I heard,” Toussaint said.
“Heard from who?” Sholto asked.
“Oh, you know, scuttlebutt,” Toussaint said. “A couple of weeks, one way or another, we’ll be leaving.”
“One way or another?” Sholto said.
“That’s what I heard,” Toussaint said. “I also heard some people think there’s a chance we’ll stay here, in Ireland. That, if the zombies are dying, it’ll be safer. That’s what some people are saying.”
“These people, do they want to stay in Ireland?”
“I couldn’t speak for them, sir.”
“What do you think?”
“Me? I think we should stick together,” Toussaint said. “I also know it’s a long time since I saw a paycheck from the U.S. government, but I’m still taking orders. I don’t mind while the emergency is underway, but no emergency can last indefinitely.”
Sholto picked his words carefully. “Do you think a lot of people feel this way?”
“Increasingly so,” Toussaint said.
“Good to know,” Sholto said, taking the warning for what it was. “Well, a couple of weeks should be long enough
. Either we can get a helicopter fixed in an afternoon, or we can’t get it fixed at all. It’s much the same with the ships. It won’t take long to know if they’re seaworthy. It will take time getting our best sailors, our best engineers, from here to France. Two weeks? That should probably do it, and probably be enough time for us to get ready. We don’t want to rush off into the unknown leaving half our supplies behind. We don’t want to leave our doctors behind either, and most of them are down in Elysium. Do you think people can… can wait that long?”
“Two weeks, I hope so,” Toussaint said.
When they returned to the road, they found another corpse in the ditch, and Lena cleaning gore from an arrow.
“Change of plans,” Sholto said, scanning the tree-lined road for more movement. “There’s food inside, so we’ll split up. Lena, Gloria, you’re going north with Theo. Dean, Luca, we’ll search the supermarket, get a feel for how much is here and how many people we’ll need to bring it back to the harbour.”
“Ah, hang on,” Gloria said. “Our lunch? The private’s still got it in his bag.”
“You’ve got an entire supermarket to chose from,” Petrelli said.
“Food in rusting cans? No thanks,” Gloria said.
“Hand it over, Private. Quick now,” Toussaint said.
Petrelli unclipped the clasp of the saddlebag, opened the flap, peered inside, and froze.
“Sir,” he hissed.
“What?”
“It’s a bomb!”
Chapter 13 - Road Side
Nutts Corner, Belfast
“That’s a claymore,” Toussaint said. He carefully unclipped the bag from the bike and placed it on the roadway. As Dean, Lena, Gloria, and Petrelli stepped back, Sholto stepped forward and peered into the bag.
“It’s attached to a semi-circular plastic case,” Sholto said. “Three inches wide, two deep, I think. A travel alarm clock? Hard to say with the case closed. Can’t be a motion sensor, since our jostling journey would have triggered a detonation. Do you know much about explosives?”
“I know enough to leave them alone,” Toussaint said. “What about you?”
