Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest

by Tayell, Frank

  “You know?” Kevin asked, somewhat redundantly Tuck thought.

  She made a shooing motion. Perhaps out of the shock of being discovered, Aisha complied, pausing only to take Hana’s arm. Tuck stopped them long enough to take the halberd from the young vet’s unprotesting grip.

  Hope was important. But just as important as nurturing it was ensuring that nothing happened to destroy those hopes that had yet to take root. Jay had represented it for so long. And in nine months – or to be accurate some point far less than nine months – Aisha would represent the idea that there was a future, a point to all that they suffered and struggled through. It was very unlikely Aisha would be the only new mother. No, that was one more reason to keep their doctor alive.

  Tuck waited until the two women had reached the safety of the Tower before continuing down the road. She checked one of the restaurants, an obscenely priced hamburger joint. There were napkins, cutlery, and saltshakers, but no syrup, or anything else that could be counted as calories. She waved Kevin and Graham back out onto the street. They could clear those places later. What they needed was something tangible to show for the expedition, something people could see, and in doing so understand that the risk of going outside the walls could make each of their lives measurably better. Or something that no one saw because it was always there. As the nights grew longer, what they needed was light. Ahead of her was the church. She motioned for Kevin to listen by the door. He shook his head. He’d heard nothing. They went inside.

  The church wasn’t what she’d expected. Rather, it was exactly as she should have expected, and exactly as it had been a year or decade before. Dust danced in the daylight streaming through a tall window behind the altar, but otherwise the church was unchanged. Embroidered cushions lay under seats, hymnals and prayer books were stacked neatly, ready for a service that would never begin. Despite Hana’s objections, they would make good kindling, and paper was always needed, but Tuck found, suddenly, she didn’t care.

  She closed her eyes, trying to rid her mind of the question over the identity of the body lying a short distance away. They’d lost people getting out of Kirkman House, but they had reached the Tower. Jay was alive, and would be tomorrow. Hopefully, they all would. That was what mattered now, she told herself, not the past.

  There was a tap at her arm. It was Kevin. On his face was a grin, and in his free hand was a candle, two-feet long and three-inches wide at the base.

  “Dozens,” he mouthed, gesturing over his shoulder. He’d found a store cupboard full of boxed candles, a mixture of the votive and those large enough to light the entire church.

  Candles, bleach, a few broken rifles, and a few hundreds rounds of ammunition; it wasn’t much for an entire day’s labour. As they carried the boxes back to the Tower, Tuck hoped that they would find Nilda had returned, and with a better haul. There was no sign of her as they headed back to the church, nor when they returned from the second trip. On the third, they were interrupted by a stray zombie slouching up the road from the west. On the fifth, the rain began to fall.

  When Tuck went for dinner, there was still no sign of Nilda. The idea of sitting in the dining hall without Jay’s company was less appealing than the food. Making conversation out of mimes and the few, mostly martial, signs that the group had picked up took a considered effort that she wasn’t in the mood to endure, so she took her bowl up to the relative privacy of the walls. The meal Stewart had cooked wasn’t too bad, but somehow he’d managed to make it over seasoned and bland at the same time. There mustn’t be much choice in ingredients, she supposed. It was hot, and it filled a hole, that was what counted.

  The brief shower had ceased, but the sky hadn’t cleared. Ominous clouds scudded east promising a longer lasting deluge to come. They’d have to find an alternative to the increasingly ineffective solar panels. Wind turbines, perhaps, although she didn’t know where they would find them. During the summer, she’d checked the roofs they could reach using the walkways but found none. Perhaps Chester would know where in London they might look. And that thought had her standing up and staring down the length of the river in the hope that wishing might make the boat appear. It didn’t.

  Not wanting to be idle while there was daylight left, she turned her attention to the rifle. Not the three they’d brought back from Westminster, but the weapon that had been part of the display on modern warfare in the Fusiliers museum. She quickly dismantled it, and it didn’t take much longer to strip the broken weapons. A few minutes after that she held in her hands what she was nearly confident was a working rifle. It just needed to be cleaned and then it could be tested. She took the rifle apart again.

  A few minutes later, she wasn’t surprised to see McInery appear through the arched doorway of the nearest tower. She was surprised with what the woman said.

  “When I was emptying my pack, I found another twenty cartridges. Here.” McInery held them out. “They’re of no use to me.”

  Tuck nodded and found herself smiling politely as she waited for the question she was sure was coming. Again, she was wrong.

  “Each day seems to bring events we could never have dreamed of,” McInery said. “Yet I can’t think of a situation where a rifle would help. Except, of course, the most desperate of ones, where all hope is already lost.” She bent down and picked up a tubular piece with a pistol grip that Tuck had meant to hide away. “This is what I think it is?” she asked. “A grenade launcher attachment for one of the rifles, yes?”

  “It doesn’t work,” Tuck signed. “If you fired it, the grenade would detonate in the barrel.” That wasn’t true. She’d found nothing wrong with it at all.

  “More useless against the undead than a rifle,” McInery said, again contrary to Tuck’s expectations, though she seemed reluctant to put it down. “An exploding zombie would spread infected guts over the shooter and anyone else within range. Useless.”

  “They should be back soon,” Tuck signed, trying to draw McInery’s mind to something else.

  “The lifeboat? Yes, I suppose.” She placed the grenade launcher on the ground. “And of course that’s important…” But McInery turned her head and started walking away, and Tuck couldn’t see what else she said.

  She mulled over what McInery had wanted in Westminster if not a firearm. The only conclusion that came close to plausible was that it was akin to the desperation that had her, Tuck, seeking fuel at the airport. It was the desire to believe that there was something out there, some simple thing that could make life as easy as it had once been. A magic bullet, she thought, picking up one of the rounds. That didn’t fit with McInery’s personality. Whatever the reason, Tuck decided there was little point dwelling on it. Nor was there any point having a rifle and not knowing if it worked. She loaded the round, balanced the gun on the walls, rigged it with a piece of string, and fired into the river.

  She regretted the shot almost immediately. Not because the sound would summon more of the living dead, but because after she’d picked the rifle up from the battlement walkway she saw that everyone had run out to see what had caused such an unfamiliar noise. On each face there was an expression of hopeful glee that turned sour when they realised the shot did not presage the arrival of a rescue party sailing up the Thames.

  19th September

  Midnight came, the clouds cleared, and there was no sign of the lifeboat. At one a.m. Tuck retreated to her own bivouac on top of the Wakefield Tower. It was another restless night. Every few minutes she’d think she sensed the boat’s return and couldn’t dismiss the notion until she’d left her shelter and stood up to look. The night wore on, the clouds returned, the stars disappeared, and she saw nothing but the lamps she’d hung as a beacon from the outer wall. As a light drizzle turned to a persistent rain, she couldn’t even see those, but still found herself compelled to go and check. An hour before sunrise, she gave up on sleep and stood by the walls. For the briefest moment, an illusion of mist, fog, and the light from the false dawn made the skyline on the southe
rn bank appear almost as it once had. But when day slowly seeped along the river, the ruined city opened up before her, and she saw it as the desolate ruin it truly was and now forever would remain.

  She went to find breakfast, and found she wasn’t the only one up early, nor the only one who’d spent the night waiting for the boat. As the number of restless people grew and started to get in the way of those trying to get on with the day’s chores, she organised a group to go and strip the restaurants and cafes of anything that could burn. She took eight people with her, and for half an hour the work was a welcome distraction. But that distraction made them incautious. Whether by chance or summoned by the sound of their labour, the undead appeared. At first it was one or two, and they were quickly dispatched. That bred complacency.

  They were strung out between the overpriced burger joint and the waist-high barrier by the moat, carrying tables and chairs back to the castle, when five zombies appeared. Chairs and tables were dropped, weapons grabbed or unsheathed, and four were quickly dispatched. The fifth wasn’t. Xiao, a former concert pianist stranded in London during the outbreak, sliced at the zombie with an eighteenth-century sabre. His wild slashes cut flesh but did little real damage to creatures that noticed no pain.

  Her first shot missed the zombie’s head, taking it in the shoulder. That was enough to spin it back, away from the downed man, and it gave Kevin the chance to step in and bring his axe down on its skull. Following the sound of the shot, or of the fight, more creatures came soon after. Within ten minutes, they were all standing on the moat side of the chest-high tourist barrier, cleaving axes, stabbing spears, and hacking swords down on the living dead. It was two hours before a whole twenty minutes went by without any more appearing.

  Tuck counted the bodies. Sixty-eight of the undead. She’d thought there would be more. Still, it was a good count for the morning, and there had been no injuries amongst the living. It was a drop in the ocean, but perhaps all those little drops did add up. More importantly, there was a genuine look of achievement in the faces around her, one that didn’t completely vanish when they realised they had to get rid of the corpses.

  She ordered half of the wood to be taken inside, and the other half broken up, to be used in a pyre. She was still working out where that should be built when the heads around her turned to the castle walls. There was a figure waving and pointing towards the river. She looked to Kevin.

  “The boat’s returned,” he said.

  When she reached the path along the waterfront, she saw everyone crowded near the steps up which came Nilda and Jay.

  “Where’s Chester and the others?” she signed.

  “We don’t know,” Jay signed back. “They went ashore. We waited for them but they didn’t return. When the tide turned we came back, because… well…” He looked at his mother. Nilda was clearly explaining the same thing to the group at large.

  “They know where London is. They know where the Tower is,” Nilda was saying. “We left them with a life raft, and we know where that is. But we’re running out of time. We saw two farms on our way down there. Perhaps ‘farms’ is a bit generous. There’s one with at least three trees, their branches laden with fruit. There was another with a polytunnel that looked promising. I know, I know, it’s not much. But it’s more than we’ve got. I need some people to come with me, back along the coast to gather what food we can. After that, we’ll head to the beach where we left Chester and the others. Perhaps they’re there with packs full of food and the addresses of where we might find more. Perhaps they’re paddling that raft towards us right now. Or perhaps they’re not, but we can’t sit in a lifeboat off the beach waiting for them.”

  Mouths opened, and a myriad questions were fired off, but Hana ended the debate before it had a chance to begin.

  “Everyone who went out with Tuck yesterday or this morning,” she said. “You’re on the expedition.”

  And perhaps because they were given no choice or time to think, no one seemed reluctant. Even counting the time it took for some to change and gather clean or better weapons, they departed less than thirty minutes later.

  As Tuck looked around the faces, mostly still eager, she was struck by how packed the boat was despite the claim painted on the side that it could fit a hundred and fifty. Hana was clutching a sword, the same one that Tuck had handed her the day before when she’d taken the vet’s halberd before sending her back to the Tower. She wasn’t happy that Hana was with them, but perhaps it was important as a symbol, not out of a demonstration of leadership, but of each person doing all they could, all of the time. She’d let Xiao off the detail. The man had been limping earlier, and as she looked around the boat there was no sign of Graham. She wasn’t sure she’d seen him at all that morning. McInery had her battle-axe. Kevin and Aisha talked quietly, smiling as they honed the edge of their shorter war axes. No, she thought, they didn’t resemble the passengers from a cruise ship at all. There was a tap on her shoulder. It was Jay.

  “It’s like a Viking war party,” he signed, amused. “So, anything exciting happen whilst we were away?”

  “Not really,” she replied, and began to tell him.

  The first farm really wasn’t anything of the sort, just an immaculately maintained house with three apple trees in a corner of the garden. As the undead slowly gathered on the other side of a high fence separating the house from a once busy coastal road, they hastily gathered the fruit that had fallen. They shook the trees to encourage more to drop, but there was still plenty that stubbornly refused to fall. When Kevin walked towards the tree, his axe in hand and a calculating look in his eye, Tuck had grabbed his arm to stop him.

  “What about next year?” she signed. He hadn’t understood, or perhaps he had but disagreed, but at that point the fence broke, and they retreated back to the boat.

  The second really was a farm, or it had been. A long polytunnel ran across a paddock overlooking the sea. Behind it was a farmhouse, and behind that were scores of plastic-covered tunnels filling the farmland for a mile in either direction. Unfortunately almost all the tunnels had survived the months of neglect intact. Without irrigation, the plants inside had withered and died. The one exception was a twenty-metre long section near the edge of a field where a branch had fallen from an old oak, smashing the plastic and exposing the plants inside to the elements.

  “They’re strawberries,” Hana said.

  It was too late in the year for any fruit, but they added a dozen trays to the lifeboat’s cargo in the hope they might find a way of keeping the plants alive through the winter.

  Tuck didn’t need Jay to point out the beach on which Chester and the others had gone ashore. The bright orange life raft was unmistakable, as were the undead surrounding it.

  “What do we do?” Jay asked.

  “There’s no point killing the zombies, not if Chester and the others aren’t nearby,” Nilda said. The tension, which had been building since the raft and the undead had first been sighted, dissipated a little.

  “But do you think they are somewhere close, just waiting for us?” Jay asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Nilda said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Can you shoot them?” Jay asked Tuck.

  “Yes,” she signed. “But more will come.”

  “Fire it anyway,” Jay said. “If they’re close by, they’ll hear the shots.”

  “If they came back and saw the undead, they won’t have lingered,” Tuck signed, but she saw the desperate need in Jay’s eyes. She understood it. The boy had to know that everything that could be done had been done. She unslung the rifle, took aim, and fired. A zombie fell. She aimed again. Fired. Missed. The first shot, she decided, had been a lucky one. She fired again. Another miss.

  “It’s the boat,” she signed. “The waves make it too unsteady to get a clear shot.”

  “Three is enough,” Jay said. “If they’re nearby they’ll have heard.”

  They all stood or sat, eyes scanning the shore, waiting. She kept he
r own eyes on the undead as ten of them staggered out towards the lifeboat. A large wave crashed against the shore, knocking three over. The others staggered on. Another wave, and another two were swept from their feet. Once down, they had difficulty standing up. It was a pitiful sight. She was about to suggest they leave when Hana spoke.

  “That’s long enough,” she said. “As Nilda said, there’s no point waiting here. We’ll go back.”

  They arrived at the Tower long after nightfall. They’d travelled slowly, scanning the shore for anywhere they might find food, and gone ashore twice more. They found a row of straggly beans growing up the side of a barn on the first trip, and the second excursion was cut short when the rain started falling again.

  “It’s not much,” Nilda said, looking at their haul. “Barely a day’s worth of food.”

  “I don’t know what we should do,” Hana said. “I was hoping Chester would have found more. I… No, I really don’t know.”

  “We’ll have to take the boat out again,” Nilda said. “We might get lucky. If we don’t then we’ll all have to go out on foot, each in a different direction, and hope we find something.”

  Tuck wasn’t ready to pin her future on hopes as thin as that. One trip, one day, but unless they were visited by a miracle, someone else would have to be sent to Anglesey. Perhaps they should all go. The uncertain risks of the undead were preferable to the certain finality of starvation.

  Part 3:

  A Crowded House

  18th September

  “You understand why I’m not coming with you?” Nilda asked. They were in the lifeboat’s small cockpit. Jay and Greta were sitting on the deck watching for obstructions. Finnegan and Reece were inside checking and rechecking their gear.

  “You mean other than your leg?” Chester asked. “Because that limp of yours does have a tendency to come and go. No, look, I get it. You found your son. That was what this was all about.”