by Frank Tayell
“Why would they go to Kew?” Kim asked.
“That’s the botanical gardens, right?” Sholto asked.
“Yeah, finest rare specimens. Greenhouses, ancient trees, the works,” I murmured.
“So why go there?” Kim asked again.
“I don’t know,” I said, “At one point I was thinking of going there myself. But that was months ago.”
“Is there food? Vegetables, fruit, that kind of thing?”
“Not really. I mean, there’s some but no more than you’d find in the back gardens of any suburban street. There’s more exotic stuff in the greenhouses, and when I was thinking of coming here, that’s what I was after. The seeds, you see. But without power, without water, without heat, without constant care and nurturing everything in those greenhouses must be dead by now.”
“So you wouldn’t go there?”
“Now? No. It’s about four miles from here in a straight line, five or six by road. You could travel the same distance in any direction and have your pick of hospitals, police and fire stations, a university and more houses and shopping centres than you could loot in a year. Or if you want somewhere built in a pre-plumbing era, there’s Hampton Court Palace a few miles south, on the other side of the Thames. No, I wouldn’t go to Kew, not now,” I said, “but what I’m trying to remember is whether I told Annette that.”
“They weren’t walking,” Kim said abruptly.
“What?”
“They weren’t on foot.”
“How can you tell?”
“No fuel cans, for one thing.”
“They could have been thrown overboard.”
“If they’d been used up. But if they’d used the engine to get here, then what about the zombies? Where are They?”
I looked around, properly this time. I’d registered that there weren’t any close by, we all must have. But I hadn’t considered what that meant. There should have been lots.
Over the last few months, every unsecured boat and piece of drifting wreckage between here and the previous lock had been dragged by the current to become part of that hulking great dam. Each bang and scrape should have brought the zombies out to investigate, and they would have stayed, waiting for prey. If the others had used the boat’s engine then They would have heard it and headed back up stream towards the noise, making it impossible to get off the boat.
“The fuel tanks empty,” Sholto said, straightening up, “And I mean bone dry. It’d be a bit of a coincidence for them to run out right here.”
“They took the petrol, and drove,” Kim said, firmly. “The undead followed. It’s what they would have done. They wouldn’t have split up.”
“There’s no food either,” my brother went on.
“They’d have taken it with them,” Kim said.
“No, I meant there are hardly any wrappers. No cans or bottles, nothing.”
“They definitely took food. I loaded it onto the truck back at the Abbey myself.”
“Enough detective work,” Kim said. “Shall we go to Kew?”
We made sure our little boat was securely tied to the bank, a little way upstream. We took our weapons and enough food and water for a few days. We couldn’t carry much else, not on foot, but even so I didn’t like the idea of leaving all our supplies unattended. I guess the old-world fear of theft is very deeply engrained. We agreed if we were split up to meet back on the boat, and if that wasn’t possible then back at the safe house we’d passed upstream.
“London’s changed,” Sholto said. “Everything seems smaller and bigger at the same time.”
“It’s bound to, if you left here when you were a kid.”
“I’ve been here since,” he said, “but only fleetingly and there wasn’t any time for sightseeing. There certainly are more apartment blocks, but that wasn’t what I meant. Everything seems like it’s the wrong size.”
I knew what he meant. The roads seemed wider but shorter, the houses more towering but closer together, the shops smaller, their windows darker and now filled with nothing but menace. Where a falling branch had broken a section of fencing I saw a lawn carpeted yellow with daisies and dandelions, but that was the exception. Every other garden we passed was parched, the flowerbeds wilting, the lawns ragged, the trees already beginning to die. Conversely the pavements and walls were beginning to turn green with moss and weeds.
The streets were filled with wind-blown rubbish, yet it would only have taken a few hours work to clear them, a few days more to re-paint the houses, to fix the windows and clean the pavements. It is a city that could be mended and made whole once again. But by the time there are enough people to do that work, if there ever is such a time, nature will have reclaimed what once was hers. The city is lost, we may be the last people ever to see it, and for some reason I don’t find that at all depressing.
“There. That hat. That’s Daisy’s,” Kim said, running across the road and snatching a bonnet from on top of a rubbish bin. We were in Richmond, about halfway between Kew and where we’d left the boat.
“The bill, it was pointing towards Kew, right?” she asked.
“Why would they have stopped?” I muttered, more to myself than anyone else, as I looked up and down the street.
“Is it pointing to Kew or not?” Kim asked again, more insistently.
“Quiet!” I hissed. The bin was outside one of those generic one-stop-shops selling branded goods at twice the price of the supermarket an inconvenient few blocks further away.
“The window was broken recently,” I whispered. “Look at the dirt on the pavement. There’s none on the glass.”
“They went in there?”
“They stopped here,” I said. “How else would the hat end up there? Just listen.”
There was a scratching sound from inside.
“Mice?” Kim asked. It was wishful thinking. We all knew it.
I took a step towards the shop.
“Wait,” she hissed, but I couldn’t. We had to know.
I stepped over the broken window and into the shop. The aisles were narrow, too close together for the pike. I shifted it to my left hand, and took out the hatchet.
The light from outside didn’t penetrate far into the shop. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. That was why I almost tripped over the body.
It was male. Or it had been, months ago. I couldn’t say more than that because a good portion of the head, including the face, was missing. The zombie had been shot and at close range.
“Stewart’s shotgun,” I murmured as I took another step forward.
There was a crunch of glass behind me. I whirled round. Kim and Sholto had both stepped into the shop.
I bit my lip, trying to will my suddenly racing heart to quiet down. I breathed out. Listened. There. There was a long slow scratching coming from the rear of the shop.
One foot after another, my back to the shelves, I edged along the aisle, my eyes darting left and right and forward and back.
My right foot came down on a tube of something. The cap flew off, and pinged against a distant metal bracket. The scratching sound, now closer, suddenly became more frenetic.
I’d had enough. I took a breath and walked as briskly as I could towards the sound, swinging the axe up as I reached the end of the long aisle and turned the corner and saw... just another zombie. Not one of the girls, nor Barrett or Stewart or Daphne. It was just some unknown poor soul missing an arm and the lower part of both legs. I swung the hatchet down. It died.
I breathed out. Then listened.
I couldn’t hear anything else. I bent down. I could make out the shotgun pellets in the wall and floor around where the creature had lain. I turned and walked just as briskly back along the aisle.
“Come on,” I said to the other two. “Let’s get moving.”
“Were they here?” Kim asked
“They were, but not anymore. They must have gone in looking for food. Stewart or Barrett, probably. Perhaps Annette was told to help with the car
rying. Someone fired two shots at that zombie at close range and managed not to kill it. Just blew off its feet and an arm. There was another zombie and the gun wasn’t loaded. They were chased out of the store and it took that long to reload the gun and fire again. That killed the second one. At some point before, during or after, Annette must have dropped that hat on the bin. It probably was pointing towards Kew. They must have been desperate to have stopped here, especially if they were driving.”
“We should hurry,” Kim said, already striding off down the street.
No matter how quiet we tried to be, it wasn’t quiet enough. Sometimes we’d hear a scurrying from the back of another shop. Sometimes we’d hear a scuffling from behind a closed door or from one of the flats above. Sometimes all we’d hear was the tinkling of glass on the road behind us as undead hands or heads broke through a top floor window. A few times that sound of breaking glass would be followed by a bone-cracking thump of a body hitting the pavement.
Not every home over those few miles and a few dozen streets has become some zombie’s tomb, but enough that it made the whole place seem like a Necropolis.
Three times we turned a corner and found ourselves facing the undead. Once we turned and ran down an alley. Twice we stood our ground, Kim with her axe, Sholto with his machete and me with my pike. We only paused once after that shop, when we came across three corpses.
They were corpses, not the undead. They were lying in the middle of the road, just short of a pedestrian bridge over the fenced in railway line. Four crows perched proprietorially on a lamp post above them. Those birds had been busy, turning the bodies into little more than skeletons. Two of the dead lay in the road, one with a carving knife still lodged in its ribcage, the other had had its skull crushed. The third had died sitting with her back leaning against a red post box a few feet from the other two. We paused there long enough to make a hole in the fence, but didn’t bother to find out how that third one had died.
“Someone’s down there. Someone alive I mean,” Kim said.
“But is it Annette and Daisy?” Sholto asked.
As we got closer to Kew, we came across more and more of the undead. I had hoped we could cut through the golf course to the south of the gardens and then just climb over the wall, but we’d given up on that and returned to the side streets. That was how, about two hours after we’d left the boat, we found ourselves lying on the roof of an apartment block overlooking the main entrance to Kew.
“That’s the main entrance?” Sholto asked.
“According to this,” Kim said, looking at the pamphlet we’d brought from their boat, “it’s the Victoria Gate, with a ticket office, a restaurant and shop.”
The gate is a great wrought iron affair embedded in thick stone. Embedded in the iron gate, and half knocking it over, is a bottle-green SUV. Around it, behind it, and past it, clawing at the building itself, are the undead.
“They drove up, and crashed, but what then?” I muttered, taking the scope.
“Can you see anyone?” Sholto asked.
“No one. But the doors and windows are all blocked up. The ones I can see.” The building was a relatively new construction, built around a four storey Victorian tower. I quickly played the scope over the rest of the Gardens.
The trees were in full leaf, though there were a few fallen branches on a slightly ragged lawn, the fountains weren’t running and green was now the predominant colour in the flower beds. Otherwise it can’t have looked much different last year. Taking just that section of the view I could almost believe there had been nothing more calamitous than a great storm. I could even, almost, pretend that the pack of zombies around the front gates were tourists clamouring for tickets. Almost. It was the greenhouse that gave the lie to that fantasy.
The glass had been broken, the frame hewn almost in two. I can only guess at the sequence of events, but without power to keep the interior warm and moist, the soil dried up, the roots lost anything to grip and, one by one or all together, the exotic trees and palms tumbled forward and back, smashing through the glass panes, fracturing the wrought iron frame.
A few panes of glass still hung from a few sections on either side, but otherwise the ground around the greenhouse was littered with dead plants and broken glass and twisted iron.
Only one tree remained, a majestic giant palm that must have been as tall as the building before the glass had broken. With nothing left to hem it in, it had spread its fronds, each as big as a person, out and up to catch the sun. It was quite a sight.
“There has to be someone in there,” Kim said, and I brought the scope back to the building. “Something has to be attracting the undead. Look at Them. They’re actually trying to break through the glass. Someone has to be in there!”
“But is it your girls?” Sholto asked. “From what you said and what I’ve seen, Annette’s resourceful. She could have grabbed Daisy when the car crashed. For all we know she could be in one of the apartments below us, watching the street, waiting for us to walk by.”
“You think she is?”
“No hang on,” Sholto said. “I don’t mean we should do a room to room search. If we started that...”
“Quiet. Just a moment.” There was something about the building. Something I’d seen but not registered. “There, the tower. Look at the tower.” I handed the scope to Kim.
“A red towel. Hanging from the arch at the top. She’s there. See?” she handed it to Sholto.
“She was there,” he said, after taking a turn to examine the tower. “We don’t know if she’s still there now.”
“Oh, come on! Look at the zombies around the door. They’re trying to get in.”
“Someone is in there. I’m not saying we don’t go down there. I’m just saying we need to make sure we know who we’re saving. Whilst we’re at it, it’d help if they knew we were coming. Does she know Morse code?”
“No.”
“You didn’t set up any kind of code or anything?”
“Seriously? What do you think?”
“We’ll hang up some sheets,” I suggested. “From the roof, here. They’ll be visible to anyone down there. That’ll give her warning we’re coming. No, I’ll go and find them. You two keep watch.”
I needed some space. Kim was worn out. I haven’t known her long, but I could see that. The last thing I wanted was her charging around from apartment to apartment.
A year and a lifetime ago, what had happened to her would have been called slavery and she’d have had decades of therapy to look forward to. What had happened to her since, just keeping alive, keeping me alive, I don’t think there’s an old-world name for it. Now she’s at breaking point. As for Sholto, I’m not sure Kim likes him very much. And me, all I know is that the more time I spend with him the more I’m reminded that he’s little more than a stranger who came into my life by blackmailing me.
I took my time going through the apartments. The building was full of noises and I paused at walls and doors, listening for any sounds of life. I heard none. At four I heard the undead. I left Them alone.
The sheets, red ones, came from an equally red apartment, with mirrors above the beds, above the bath and even, inexplicably, on the kitchen ceiling. We hung the sheets over the side of the roof.
That was three hours ago. We’re still waiting.
Day 130, Garden View Apartments, Kew, London
03:00, 20th July
Kim woke me around twenty minutes ago. It’s too dark to see what colour it is, but another towel has been added next to the red one on top of the tower.
“That’s it. She’s there. I know she is,” Kim said, her tone daring us to suggest differently.
“That’s good enough for me,” Sholto said. “So what now?”
Day 130, Penlingham Spa & Golf Club,
Milton Keynes
20:00, 20th July
“So what now?” Sholto had asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “There are at least two hundred zomb
ies down there. We’re not going to be able to kill Them all. We’ll have to lure Them away. I’ll go back to the boat and bring back some petrol. Then we’ll find a car and I’ll drive it up to the gates. Kim you stay up here with the rifle...”
“Like hell I will!”
“You go down there and they’ll just start shooting. If Sholto goes down and asks them to hand over the girls, then they just might.”
“They won’t,” she said. “There’s nothing in the world that’s going to get them to do that.”
“The zombies will be gone. This will be their chance to escape too. Their only chance, but only if they hand over the girls. That’s why you need to be up here with the rifle. If the girls don’t come out first, then you can shoot them.”
“I’m going to shoot them anyway,” she said.
“Kim’s right,” my brother said. “The time for subtlety has long past. We get the girls out and burn the place down.”
“Enough with the posturing!” I snapped. “Six months ago she made coffee and I wrote speeches. Killing people isn’t the same as killing the undead. We can’t just go in there with guns blazing. I mean for one thing, we’ve only got a few hundred rounds and most of that is for your M-16, which you’ve admitted yourself isn’t exactly accurate.”
“No,” he said with infuriating patience, “you don’t understand. I mean we should literally burn the place down. We get the girls out first, and I’ll be honest I like the idea of offering Barrett and the others sanctuary. That should get them out in the open, then Kim can shoot them. If that doesn’t work, then I want to make sure that ten years from now I don’t wake up with a knife to my throat. This ends here and now. If we can’t shoot them, then we burn them out.” He put his hand in his bag and brought out a cylinder. “I brought three of these from Lenham Hill.”
