“But I can,” Jay said.
“And you’re coming with me to Kent. We’ll pilot the boat, but we won’t go ashore.”
“Why not?” Jay asked.
“Because someone has to stay on board.”
“Then you can do that,” Jay said. “You don’t need me to stay as well. Look, Mum, I fought my way down from Cumbria. I know how to handle myself, and I’m better at it than most of the people here. Ask them. They’ll tell you.”
“Why do the young always think it’s about themselves?” Nilda asked of the world at large. “Jay, less than a month ago I was on an island out in the middle of the Atlantic wearing nothing more than rags. I had to watch as every last one of the people that saved me from a watery grave died from radiation poisoning. And then I had to bury them with my bare hands. The closest I’ve come to a day’s rest since was on the boat from Scotland down to Anglesey. I’m tired. I’m sore. I thought my son was dead, and now I find he’s alive. Forgive me if, after all I’ve been through, I want to spend a couple of hours with him in relative safety.”
“Right. Yeah. Sorry,” Jay mumbled.
Nilda immediately regretted her words. They were true, and it was important that Jay understood, but the tone was half a year out of date. As Chester gathered the scraps of paper and placed them in an upturned Roundhead’s helmet, a dozen lies that would have better salved Jay’s young ego came to her. But it was too late.
Reece, Greta, and Finnegan had drawn the short straw and were going to Kent with Chester. As soon as their names had been drawn out, Chester hurried them to get ready, and then hustled them out to the boat with hours to go before the tide changed. Nilda followed them, finding a perch by the lifeboat’s controls. The three people looked reliable enough, and Tuck had given her stamp of approval on the volunteers. So why did she feel such a foreboding weight of anxious finality when she looked from one face to the next?
Finnegan pulled out a long bayonet, then took off his belt and adjusted the scabbard. Chester had made them swap the long spears that had become most of the survivor’s weapon of choice for the less imposing but far more practical hand-axes. The bayonets had been Tuck’s suggestion. They were early twentieth-century models from the small Fusiliers museum that took up one corner of the inner Tower’s grounds. She’d also had to tell them to get rid of the armour that most had taken. Plate and chain mail might stop a bite, but the best protection against the undead was speed.
Finding a farm shouldn’t be difficult. They just had to follow the coast with an eye on the shore and another on the map. As Chester had said, it should almost be like a holiday, and then they’d return to the Tower with the tide. Perhaps they’d have time to gather some food, perhaps even to fill the boat. Probably not, but either way they should be back at the castle before the next evening meal.
No, that wouldn’t be difficult. It was the next part that would be deadly hard. They would have to take as many people as they could down to the farm and fill every bag and container they had. There was no way of doing that safely. If they filled the rafts and towed those behind the boat, they would be able to bring back more. And they would need to. In a few weeks the true autumn storms would set in. At about the same time, the diesel would run out, and any fruit left on the trees would have fallen to add its bulk to the leaf matter fertilizing the orchards. Then there would be no more food until they’d grown it. And that was where the true danger lay.
If they found nothing in Kent, or if they didn’t find enough, or if there was no food to spare in Wales, or if the boat they sent was lost at sea, or if one of a hundred other possible calamities befell them, they would face starvation before winter began and would all certainly be dead long before the spring.
Part 2:
The Ruins of Whitehall
18th September
Tuck slowly lowered the packs and improvised oars down the side of the Tower. She and McInery were going to Westminster alone. Perhaps out of guilt that they’d escaped the obviously more dangerous trip to Kent, people had volunteered to go with them. Tuck had turned down their offers of help. It was Nilda’s fault. Or it was Chester’s. Or maybe it was no one’s.
She’d never entirely trusted McInery. During their days trapped in the British Museum she’d realised there was something inherently dangerous about her. Those suspicions, confirmed by Chester and his revelations about the woman’s past, had now grown to encompass nearly everyone in the Tower. Finnegan, for example, had seemed to be a close confidant of the woman back in Kirkman House. She was equally wary of Greta and Reece. That was why, when Chester had asked who would be most reliable on the trip to Kent, she’d given him those three names.
The rope went suddenly slack. She’d not noticed that the bundle had hit the ground. She grabbed the other pack, clipped it onto another rope, and began lowering it. She felt slightly guilty about helping Chester arrange that lottery. It wasn’t that— Tuck’s thoughts were interrupted by a tap at her shoulder. It was McInery.
“I didn’t think we were due to leave for an hour,” McInery said.
Grateful that her hands were full, Tuck finished lowering the bag to the ground, perhaps a little more slowly than she needed.
“I woke early,” she signed.
“Yes. So did I,” McInery replied. “You don’t need to come. I am more than capable of completing this chore on my own.”
“I’d rather do this than spend the morning watching water boil,” Tuck replied, and that was partly true. Standing by the great stainless steel urns they used to sterilise the water was the very definition of watching one’s life tick away. “Besides,” she added, “it’s Jay’s drone. He made me promise no one else would use it whilst he was away. Sorry.”
McInery shrugged and seemed indifferent. Tuck couldn’t tell if that was genuine or a front. That was the problem; she now saw everything McInery said and did as an act.
Tuck took one last look at the Tower. Constance was shooing away the ravens while Hana fed the chickens. Or she thought it was Constance and Hana. It was hard to tell from this distance when everyone wore the same mismatched, ill-fitting clothing, but those two were always among the first to wake. Had there been a few more people up and about, then they could have used the gate, but with no one to close it behind them, they had to resort to the ropes. It was an unwelcome addition to the morning’s exertions.
Tuck couldn’t sleep inside the castle. The rooms were too small, the ceilings too low, the windows too narrow. It felt claustrophobic and crowded. Instead she’d created a bivouac on top of the Wakefield Tower. She didn’t sleep much outside either, but from there she could stand up and see the lifeboat when it was tied up. When she sat with her back against the old stone, all she could see were the tops of the skyscrapers and pretend, if only for a moment, that the world hadn’t changed.
She checked her gear one last time, grabbed a rope, and climbed over the wall. At least there were no undead on the river path this morning. When dawn had arrived and she’d accepted that another day would have to be faced on a few interrupted hours of sleep, there had been two of the undead lumbering towards the west side of the Tower. They’d come to a halt at the thick plastic barrier that separated the grassy moat from the ticket booths and restaurants to the east of the castle, and now stood immobile, almost expectant. What had summoned them, whether it had been a squeal from a pig, a groan from a person, or any other part of the clattering cacophony that heralded the group’s attempt to start the day, Tuck didn’t know. And it didn’t matter. Abruptly, their arms waved and pawed, their necks jerked back and forth, and their mouths snapped open. What had seemed like a glorious morning was destroyed in that macabre reminder that the day’s work wouldn’t be done until more of the undead had been killed.
Her feet hit the ground. She grabbed one of the smaller rafts, pushed it halfway down the worn and river-slick steps, and pulled the cord. Inflated, she found it was much larger than she’d thought. McInery’s plan, if it could be called that,
was to hope they could steer the raft through the wreckage of London Bridge. Tuck was hoping they couldn’t, and so there expedition would be brought to an early halt. But if they did make it as far as Westminster, she planned to fly the drone around the rooftops until the battery ran low, and hoped that would be enough for McInery to realise that whatever she was looking for was now gone.
“Careful with that,” Tuck signed as McInery unslung her battle-axe. It was a double-headed affair, with a blade on one side and a long spike on the other. It had been presented to a long-dead king by the long forgotten emperor of somewhere following the battle of somewhere else. Tuck couldn’t remember exactly what had been printed on the plaque next to the weapon’s display case except for the quote at the top, ‘To the victor go the spoils’. She suspected it was that which had drawn McInery to it.
Tuck used an oar to push them out into the river. The oars had once been giant rammers stored next to the cannon kept in the White Tower’s basement. They’d stripped off the thick leather and cloth padding, attaching flat squares of durable plastic in their place. The end result, Tuck thought as she tried to steer the craft towards the widest gap underneath the wrecked bridge, was as cumbersome as the raft. McInery grabbed the other oar and started paddling herself. Soon, they’d established a rhythm.
McInery wasn’t shy of work, Tuck thought, but she’d noticed that before. There was an expression her old friend, the major, had used to describe his brother, and it seemed appropriate to describe McInery. She was like a part-time preacher who’d sell you a car on Saturday, God on Sunday, and run a breakdown service from Monday to Friday. She could be relied on within very specific parameters but never trusted.
A current pulled the boat up and suddenly south, and it took a frantic five minutes of paddling before they were back on course. Tuck’s arms were beginning to tire, and from the strain in McInery’s shoulders, the other woman was feeling the same. The rafts weren’t going to work, not long-term. That was okay with Tuck, and she hoped it might help persuade McInery to give up on her quest.
Another wave, and this one far larger, caught the craft. It took all of Tuck’s concentration, and their combined effort, to stop it from crashing into the floating museum ship, HMS Belfast.
They reached London Bridge an arm-agonising ten minutes later and found it much as it had looked on the drone’s cameras the day before with the truck still balanced precariously on that thin ribbon of concrete. Water churned white over, under, and around the artificial dam of broken ships, floating debris, and the still twitching limbs of the undead.
They were halfway through the wreckage when a body fell from the bridge, landing in the middle of the raft. McInery moved with a quick efficiency that hadn’t come solely from practice since the outbreak. She slammed the oar down on the zombie’s knee, then on its back, and then its head. Tuck leaped forward, stabbing her bayonet through the back of its neck, and into its brain. Together, they hauled the motionless creature over the side.
Pulling on the twisted sections of rebar and pushing against the broken masonry, they reached the deeper water beyond the ruined bridge.
Tuck resheathed the bayonet. It could be cleaned later, but the scabbard would have to be destroyed. That was a shame. Like the knife it was an antique, but there were plenty of them, and it would be a waste of wood and water trying to sterilise it.
“Another mile, another bridge,” McInery said, turning to face Tuck. The soldier didn’t reply. She just picked up the oar and started rowing once more.
They were finally stopped half a mile from the ruins of Parliament at the remains of the Hungerford Railway Bridge. Rails and sheet metal jutted out of the river. Around them, white water danced and dashed against a staircase that, in better times, had led to a floating restaurant. The stairs now lay at right angles to the river, thudding against the broken rails with each surging wave. They secured raft by steps that led up to a giant stone obelisk.
“Cleopatra’s needle,” McInery signed. “Looted from Egypt, centuries ago.”
Tuck nodded, but her interest wasn’t in the hieroglyph-covered monument but in a building beyond. The walls of the embankment were high, the river low, and most of the building’s roof and upper floors were gone, but she thought it had once housed the Ministry of Defence. She moved closer to McInery so she could see the map.
They were on that section of the river that ran north to south from Embankment down to Vauxhall. The M.O.D. wasn’t marked, nor were any of the government buildings except for Downing Street. As she followed McInery’s finger tracing possible routes through the political heart of London, Tuck noticed that it kept hovering on, or close to, Buckingham Palace. For a second, she assumed that was where the woman wanted to go, then realised that it was probably a ploy to distract Tuck from wherever her real destination was.
“A supply dump would be established in an open space,” McInery signed. “Buckingham Palace, St James’ Park, or somewhere like that.”
“And those are beyond the drone’s range,” Tuck signed back, and to forestall any further conversation, handed McInery the ‘copter.
She smoothed down the waterproof cover – a large transparent sack Jay had insisted the laptop stay inside at all times due to the terabyte of sitcoms he’d discovered on its hard drive – turned the rotors on, and flew the drone straight up.
Tuck fixed her eyes to the laptop’s screen and the small window that showed the image from the camera. Along the road, almost as if they’d been parked, were an odd mix of refrigerated delivery trucks and armoured security vans. The software had two other windows, both blank, that would have shown the drone’s position on a street map had the GPS been working. To navigate, she had to rely on the image from the small camera, the clock, and the battery indicator. From experience she knew she’d be relying on landmarks and guesswork to match the drone’s path to the map McInery clutched in her hands.
The ‘copter kept rising, and the image changed to that of a broken window surrounded by smoke-blackened stone. Another window, this one unbroken and through which Tuck could see that the floor inside had collapsed. Up again, until the wall was replaced with a rooftop filled with aerials and satellite dishes, except at the northwestern end where there was nothing but a gaping hole.
Tilting the drone so the camera took in the skyline, she rotated it until she found the Shard. That gave her a position for London Bridge. A few more degrees of a slow turn, and the screen showed the shattered remains of the London Eye. She looked over her shoulder at the broken Ferris wheel on the southern bank of the Thames and the other side of the ruined bridge.
“It must have been deliberately targeted,” she signed.
“Probably by a submarine captain who’d spent half a day queuing for a ride,” McInery replied. “Watch the battery. There’s time for sightseeing later.”
Tuck turned her eyes back to the screen. She’d forgotten whom she was sitting next to. She kept the drone rotating, mentally noting where Big Ben should have been, and then the building-free expanse that she took to be St James’ Park. Though the screen was small, and the window showing the camera’s image even smaller, something about the park looked wrong. She tilted the drone until the camera was facing down and slowly piloted it forward.
The building she thought was the Ministry of Defence was now mostly a crater. Some of the thick, repeatedly reinforced walls were still standing, but very little of the roof was.
“There’s nothing there,” she signed, looking up at McInery.
The older woman nodded and seemed uninterested. Tuck turned the drone east. Out of the corner of her eye she caught McInery sign, “Where are you going?”
Tuck jabbed a finger down towards Charing Cross Station. She was reminded of Dev and his obsession with train stations. Not for the trains themselves, but for the storerooms that supplied all the fast food outlets. Whilst she wasn’t sure they could really call it food, they had found a lot of calories there, and Charing Cross was close to the river. H
ad been. The train station had been destroyed, not by a missile strike, but deliberately collapsed to form part of the government barricade.
She turned the drone, and then abruptly stopped it. The image juddered before settling on Nelson’s column. It, at least, still stood. She was glad of that. Not out of any martial pride, but from relief that something of the past remained in a place that had been a living museum as much as a city.
That gave her a direction. From there she headed southwest to Whitehall. She brought the drone to another hovering halt, her interest not in the government ministries, but in the long row of double-parked tanks lining both sides of the street. Treads had been dislodged, turrets dismounted, barrels bent, and there was no mistaking the impact marks on roadway and armour from high-velocity rounds. Nor was there any mistaking the shambling figures moving slowly down the road towards the drone.
McInery was trying to catch her attention. “Can you drive one of those?” she signed.
“A tank? No,” Tuck replied. It was a lie. She had been through the training course and driven one under fire, albeit only for a harrowing mile and a half, but if she revealed that, she knew full well what McInery’s next question would be. “Besides,” she added. “I don’t think any of those would be going anywhere.”
“Pity. What about the Foreign Office, can you get a view of that?”
Tuck looked back at the screen, the camera was pointing down the length of Whitehall. The grey stone buildings all looked identical to her. She just shrugged and flew the drone up to take in the rooftops once more.
“Stop. There,” McInery signed. “Ninety degrees east. There. That’s the Foreign Office. It looks intact, don’t you think?”
“That corner took a direct hit,” Tuck signed. “And those windows have gone.”
“Yes. Yes,” McInery said. There was an odd calculating look on her face.
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest Page 7
