by Frank Tayell
“So you don’t know if there’s anyone left in Ireland,” Kim cut in, “or that there ever was a village?”
“Why would they lie?”
Kim struggled to find an answer for a long moment.
“Alright. But that doesn’t really explain why they’d be waiting for you.”
“Because I knew where the virus had been created. The Captain saw the importance in destroying that facility, but he wasn’t going to launch one of his missiles at Lenham. He said there was enough radiation loose in the world already. I told him I wanted to look for my brother, but more importantly I told him that I’d probably find the Doctor at Lenham Hill. I told him I’d bring the Doctor back along with whatever research I could recover. He was very interested in that. Not interested enough to send anyone with me, but that suited me fine. I’m not a man who likes company.”
“So they’re expecting you. And if the five of us turn up, and without that Doctor, what then?” Kim asked.
“They’re not going to turn us away,” Sholto said.
“You hope,” she muttered. “The address you found for him in Lenham Hill, that’s in Wales. Why can’t we get to both?”
“If we started off now, we probably could,” I said, “But the beach is two thirds of the way up the west coast. The address Sholto found is in the north, about seventy miles east of Anglesey.” I drew a rough map. “And here in the middle, that’s the Snowdonia mountain range. I don’t want to get stuck on a single track road, halfway up a mountain with the undead in front and behind.”
“So we go to the Doctor’s house first. Then we follow the coast around. It would only be a couple of hundred miles. That’s just an extra day, two at most.”
“We can’t,” Sholto said. “Anglesey was one of the targets, because of the nuclear power station. We have to assume it was hit.”
“Which means,” I said, “whether we go to the beach or go looking for the Doctor, we’ve got to come in from the east. That means backtracking almost as far to the east as England to get from one to the other.”
“Then what if we go to the beach and then get this boat to take us around Wales and we go by sea to this house?” she suggested.
“No,” I said, firmly. “We’ll find the girls, and then get them to this beach and out to this village or anywhere else that might be safe. I’ll go and find the Doctor.”
As angry as I am at Barrett and the others, at my brother, at Quigley, and anger isn’t a strong enough word to describe how I feel about him. As angry as I am at this whole dying world and everyone and everything in it, none of it compares to the anger I feel towards myself.
Sholto tried to stop Prometheus and save the world. He failed, but he tried. That might buy enough goodwill amongst these people to overlook my involvement in the evacuation plan, but it’s not enough for me. That my complicity was unwitting doesn’t matter. Neither does the fact that I was no more venal or corrupt than almost anyone else on the planet.
If I’d not given into my own fear, back when I first found out about Lenham Hill, if I’d not buried my head the moment I was stuck in a Ministry of Defence jail for a single night, then perhaps I would have discovered what was going on. I might have been able to expose it. I might have been able to stop it. I could have tried. I know I could have done more, I could have done something. But I didn’t. I did nothing, and because of that I won’t get on this boat with Kim and the girls.
That’s why I went looking for the undead. I needed to prove that I wasn’t useless, that I could go off and find the Doctor on my own. I needed to prove it to myself, and I needed to do that whilst it still didn’t matter. If I die here, Kim and Sholto will mourn, sure. But that’ll be an end to it. If I go off on my own and just never come back, how long before one of them comes looking for me? I can’t stand that idea.
We’ll find the girls, get them to this beach and then I’ll go on. And I won’t rest until, at the very least, I know whether the immune are carriers of this virus. Not just for myself, and not just for Annette, but for everyone amongst this handful who’ve survived. It’s all I can do, and I just hope it will be enough.
OK, so I recognise the root of all this lies in the uncertainty around what might have happened to Annette and Daisy, but so what? I have to think about what will happen after we find them. It’s far better than thinking about what might have happened to them over the last ten days.
Day 128, River Thames
17:00, 18th July
Another frustrating day. The worst yet. It was around midday and we thought, for a moment, we might have found the girls. We were about fifteen miles past Windsor, when my brother spotted the house.
“That’s something you don’t expect to see,” he said, “not in England.”
“What’s that?” I asked, slightly too loudly. The gentle motion of the waves had caused me to drift off into a half-sleep.
“Flags, flying from that house there.”
We turned to look. On the north bank was a house with a garden that ran down to the river. At the edge of the lush and overgrown lawn, was a flag pole. At the top flew a South African flag with a stylised rugby ball in the centre. Underneath flew the silver fern of the New Zealand All Blacks. Under that was what looked like a plain white sheet.
“It’s a flag house,” Kim said.
“A what?” Sholto asked.
“Annette said she saw something like this before we found her. She’d taken refuge in a school, and from the top floor she’d seen a house with smoke coming from the chimney and flags flying in the garden. It was what she was looking for when we found her. She couldn’t remember exactly where...” Kim trailed off.
“There’s no such thing as a coincidence,” Sholto said.
Kim detached the scope from her rifle and peered at the house.
“I can’t see any life. No smoke either,” she said, as we drifted closer.
“What do you want to do?” Sholto asked, “Whatever it is we need to decide quickly.”
“There’s no sign of Barrett’s boat. No sign of anyone in the house,” I said.
“Annette and Daisy could be there,” Kim said, her voice taut. “Maybe they escaped and this is a sign. Maybe she hung up the flags just for us to see. We could signal. We should. There’s got to be a horn or something on the boat. Or we could fire off a shot. She’d hear that.”
“So would the undead.”
“So what? We have to do something. We have to stop. We have to see. There’s no smoke, but... maybe there’s nothing left to burn. It’s been nearly two weeks, that could be it.”
It was the slimmest of hopes, but Kim was right, we had to check. I’ll admit, as we paddled and pulled our way to shore, that hope started to grow in me too.
The man who lived in this boat had a pitiful little life. He did actually live on the boat, and he’d tried to turn it into a home. That just made his efforts all the more sad. It wasn’t a large boat to start with, but he’d partitioned it into little chambers mimicking the rooms he must have had in his house. This cabin, where we spend most of our time is done out like a living room. The armchair is rotten, the TV is covered in mildew and the arms of the sofa had to be removed just so it would fit in a space little bigger than a prison cell. This cabin, however, is palatial compared to the cupboard-sized bedroom.
Ceramic tiles had been stuck to the walls of the cubicle-shower room. Judging by the number that had fallen off he hadn’t considered that sticking them on metal bulkheads would require a different type of cement to the plaster of a brick wall. He’d even painted the number ‘17a’ on the side where the name should have been, but it was the kitchen that was the most depressing.
In the divorce or bankruptcy or whatever had befallen him, the man had been allowed to keep his kitchen appliances. Oven, fridge, dishwasher, all were in a matching charcoal grey. We’ve been using them as anchors, looping a rope through the handle, throwing one overboard when we need to stop for the night, then pulling the rope free in the morning
.
We dropped the oven overboard to arrest the boat’s motion then paddled, with a portion of the bench seat, until we were close enough to hook the pike onto the railing around the bank.
It was a large detached house, a few square feet short of being called a mansion. Probably built in the 1950’s, someone more recently had painted it white and added black mock Tudor beams to the exterior in a stunning display of failed taste.
Sholto leapt off the boat and took the lead, Kim close behind. I limped along at the back, struggling to keep up.
The long lawn leading down to the waters edge was empty. So was the patio around the side of the house. Then we heard that familiar rasping wheeze, coming from the front. Sholto glanced over his shoulder, nodded, and darted forward around the side of the house and out of sight. I heard the thump of a body collapsing to the ground, followed by a defiant yell. Kim ran forward, her axe raised, and disappeared around the corner. A few seconds later, there was that familiar meaty thud of the axe cleaving through flesh and bone. I limped on, as fast as my twisted leg would allow, cursing my infuriatingly slow progress.
When I reached the front garden, I saw the undead. Three were down, but there were another four in the drive and two more by the wide-open gate. Sholto was already moving towards the two by the front door, Kim to another two in the middle of the drive. I headed towards the gate. I swung the pike up, and remembered what had happened yesterday. I let the blade fall, until it was only a few inches above the ground. Gripping as best I could with both hands I stalked forward as the two creatures lurched at me. Their arms swung, their mouths snapped, as I pushed the axe-head forward and out and hooked it under the first zombie’s leg. I pulled and its leg came up and the creature fell down. I swung the pike to the left and hooked and pulled and the other zombie was down. I took two paces forward, plunged the spear down, once, twice and They were both still
I limped over to the gate and pushed it closed. And that’s when I saw the sign. It had blown over. I opened the gate and went outside to pick it up. It was a blue road sign, painted over it were the words ‘Safe House - Survivors Welcome’.
I turned around to call Kim and my brother over, but they’d already gone inside. I propped the sign up, made sure the gate was closed, then went to find them. They were in the kitchen.
“There’s no one here,” Kim said, her voice absent of emotion.
“There’s been no one here for months,” Sholto added.
“There’s a sign,” I said, as I walked around the kitchen and into the open plan living room. “On the road, by the front gate. It says this is a safe house.”
“There was a note. Here.” Kim said, pointing down at an empty space on the counter. “It’s gone.”
“Then how do you know it was there?” Sholto asked.
“Because,” she said slowly, “it was taped down. The tape and three of the four corners are left. It’s a map.”
“Of what?” I called out, as I bent down to look at the fireplace. Stacked next to it was a mismatched collection of broken furniture and neatly sawn logs. The grate was full of ash.
“No idea. There’s an arrow with ‘N’ at the top, and a few crooked lines underneath. But that’s all.”
“The cupboards are empty,” Sholto said. “They took the map and any food that was here. They didn’t leave a note, but then, why would they?”
“Why hang up the flags, then?” Kim murmured, quietly.
“It’s two different groups of people,” Sholto said. “The first lot, they set up the sign and left the map. The second lot, they came along and took it.”
“Obviously,” Kim snapped. “That’s not what I meant.”
I wasn’t sure what she’d meant, and I don’t think she did either.
“Annette would have left a note,” I said, loudly. “But she wasn’t here. I’d say it was two months since anyone was in this house.”
“You’re getting that from the fireplace?” Sholto asked.
“Hey, don’t knock it. I’ve seen a lot of places like this. Well, places where there’ve been people. Not quite like this though. The windows are blocked up but the door was unlocked.”
“It was locked, but the key was in the lock.” Kim said.
“Same difference,” I said. “A safe house, but set up by whom? And whom for? And who came along and took the map and the food?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kim said. “If Annette and Daisy aren’t here then we should get moving.”
Kim didn’t relax until we were all back on the boat and moving, albeit slowly, down the river.
“You think that the house Annette saw down in Hampshire was a safe house as well?” Sholto asked, half an hour later.
“It’s impossible to tell,” I said. “I mean, flying a flag so people know where you are, that’s an old trick, isn’t it? On the other hand we can’t be more than sixty or seventy miles from that house she saw. Perhaps less, but it can’t be more than a couple of days on foot or a day by bike. I think the question, the important one, is if it was the same people then did that map lead north to the river, or south down to Hampshire.”
“And that’s one we can’t answer, and the more I think about it, the more I think it doesn’t really matter,” Kim said. “I mean, we’ve got a boat, right, and we’ve got the fuel to keep it going all the way around the coast. If that submarine brought you along around the south coast, then that’s the route we’ll take. We’ll have to be careful, around the Isle of Wight, but even with the radiation that has to be safer than trying to get across to Wales by land.”
“Take this thing out to sea?” Sholto asked sceptically
“Alright, no, not this boat. We’ll find a different one. A better one, and if the river’s impassable, then we’ll have to. But going by land is dangerous when we don’t need to.”
“Finding a boat isn’t going to be easy,” I said.
“It might be. You don’t know. We won’t, not if we don’t look.”
It might, but it’s all academic. It’s something to talk about instead of worrying about the girls. There’s been no sign of them today and no sign of any other living person, no more safe houses, nothing except the occasional undead on the river banks.
Day 129, Garden View Apartments, Kew, London
19:00, 19th July
“There it is!” Kim hissed. “Their boat!”
“What? Where?” We’d set off long before dawn and made good progress as we approached London. The river had swelled and widened as it was fed by tributaries and paved over streams. Cottages and mansions had turned to terraced town houses then apartments, interspersed with those dismal 1950’s council tower blocks.
Earlier I’d been counting the windows, each one a room that Annette and Daisy might be inside of, when we nearly ran into a mostly-submerged police launch. There was a frantic ten minutes of pulling, pushing and fending off, before we were free. After that I kept my eyes glued to the river, watching out for the tell-tale ripples of further obstructions. That was why I’d not seen the boat.
“Which one?” I asked, because now that I was looking, I had no idea which of the fifty or so boats up ahead she was referring to.
We were on that section of the river just south of Richmond, where the river snakes north, before straightening and then flowing west to east through central London. Ahead of us lay Teddington Lock, but between us and it was a huge mass of wrecked ships.
The current had pulled everything that floated downstream. From rubbish to rowing boats to pleasure cruisers, it had collided and crashed into a hundred-passenger tour boat creating a densely packed agglomeration that nearly stretched from bank to bank. It was impossible to make out where one boat ended and another began, let alone which was the one we were looking for.
For me, that race to the river and the fight by the bank is a strange blur. I can remember the faces of the undead, and the strange calm that came over me when I was certain I would die, but as I scanned the river ahead, I realised I couldn�
�t remember what that boat looked like.
“Not there,” Kim snapped, and pointed at the bank a few hundred yards upstream of the wreckage. “There. The one with the blue stripe. How could you not recognise it?”
I looked and saw and wondered how I could have missed it. The boat was tied to the bank by a single rope attached to the stern. It drifted lazily in the current, a few metres from the shore. Behind it, equally lazily, drifted what looked like three towels, one red, one blue and one white.
When I looked closer I saw it did have a blue stripe running across the bow.
“No prizes for guessing why they stopped then,” Sholto said picking up his M-16. “You say they just had just the one gun?”
“A double-barrelled shotgun, yes,” I replied. “I’ve no idea how much ammo they had for it, and they might have found some other weapons.”
“So not much of a threat then?”
“Not much of a threat?” Kim said, “They murdered Liz, they were prepared to leave Chris behind before he’d turned, and then they killed an old man working on their farm. And there was his grandaughter. I don’t know what they did to her, but whatever it was, they didn’t want to talk about it, yet they were happy to talk about murder. No, they’re a threat alright.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. I’m sorry,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kim said. She’d detached the scope from the sniper rifle, and was peering carefully at the boat. “No one’s on board.”
“Why stop on that bank, though?” I muttered. “It’s the wrong side of the river for Scotland.”
“Why guess?” Sholto said. “If Annette hung those towels over the side as a clue, maybe she left you a message.”
She hadn’t, not exactly, but she had left a clue. On a bench seat in a cabin so cramped and dirty it made our little boat seem luxurious, was a pamphlet for Kew gardens. On the front was a clear, ink-blue baby’s fingerprint. Unfolding the brochure revealed a map of the botanic gardens, and right in the middle, marked out in the same blue fingerprint, was a smiling face.
