by Frank Tayell
“I have.”
“Difficult, yes,” he murmured. “Your brother came over here looking for the Doctor, the one who created the virus.”
“Yes. I was leaving tomorrow morning to try and find him.”
“You know where he is?” he asked
“Well, we’ve an address of where he might have been.”
“And where’s that?”
“Here. Wales. Somewhere along the north coast.”
The old man nodded slowly.
“He’s not there,” he said.
“What? How do you know?”
“Because I know exactly where he is. And that brings me back to this submarine and this other little community.”
“And?” I asked.
“The Doctor, he’s there. With them. And that submarine that’s not gone rogue, that’s still following their orders. Orders from the British government. From the Prime Minister.”
“Where?”
“Caulfield Hall.”
My heart sank
“That’s the Masterton’s family home up in Northumberland.”
“Spot on.”
“And Jen’s there?”
“She is.”
“And she’s calling herself PM?”
“Hardly. That honour goes to the right honourable Sir Michael Quigley.”
“Quigley’s alive? At Caulfield Hall. With the Doctor? And Jen’s there? And they have a nuclear submarine?”
“Yes to all of those questions. And we have the Vehement, and they know about us and we know about them. And if we turn that power station back on, then they will launch a missile and destroy us. And maybe they’ll do that anyway. That’s why we’re thinking of flying out of here. We’re not going to subjugate ourselves to the likes of Quigley.”
“You’ve tried to talk to them?”
“Well, yes, of course. I went there myself. I suggested a merger, and they told us to surrender. Since we’re with Mister Mills and he’s a traitor and all that, and since most of us aren’t British, well, you see the problem?”
“Why don’t they just destroy you anyway?”
“Because Mister Mills still does have his submarine. We know where they are, they know where we are. If they fire, so do we, and vice versa. Whoever fires first, it’s only the submarines that’ll survive. Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s the whole premise of nuclear war, isn’t it? But maybe there’s an alternative.”
“You want me to go to Caulfield Hall?”
“What I want doesn’t come into it. I’m too old to have wants and desires. This is a chance for those girls of yours to have a future. Think what it would be like without electricity. Oh sure, you can romanticise a life of candles and farming. But have you thought about what it would really be like? A third of the day in the fields, a third of the day on guard and the other third asleep, because you’ll be working so hard that you won’t be able to stay awake a moment longer. Have you thought about the decisions we’ll have to make in the next few months? The crops we pick to grow, those will be the ones our descendants, or yours anyway, will have to eat. Forget chocolate and tea and coffee, pineapples, oranges and bananas. There’ll be no sugar because sugar beet takes up too much land and too much processing. Since there won’t be any dentists, that’s probably a blessing. We’re not talking about a glamorised Blitz-spirit, wartime rationing, we’re talking about a life of pre-famine Irish serfdom. Worse, since we’ve got no pigs. It’ll be potatoes and eggs and maybe a chicken at Christmas and each year there’ll be less food, but that won’t matter because each year there’ll be fewer people to eat it. Do you know how to make candles? Because when the batteries go that’s all the light we’ll have. Do you know how to spin wool? Because when the moths and mildew destroy what we’re wearing you’ll have to.”
“There are the supplies on land,” I said, “just waiting to be taken.”
“They won’t last for ever, and you know that. In a few years, I’ll be dead. Donnie, he’s funny, you know. Him and Ronnie they talk all the time about what life will be like for them when they reach my age. I don’t like to tell them that they probably never will. It’s the same for your girls. Each year there will be fewer supplies from the old world left, and fewer people to go out and collect them. The zombies haven’t stopped yet, so why should They ever? And you’re not going to be the only people out trying to grab the scraps from the old world. Bitten, shot or stabbed, from sickness and suicide and exhaustion, each year there will be more to do and fewer people to do it. The doctors will die, the medicines will run out, the tools will rust, the ammunition will be used up. With electricity, maybe it’ll be different. Maybe we’ll have a chance. Without it, then the only hope is somewhere a bit warmer with a better climate and a longer day. Otherwise our only legacy is going to be barbarism and despair.”
“So,” I asked again, “you want me to go to Caulfield Hall?”
“Alright, yes. I want you to go there.”
“And do what? Burn it down?”
“Hardly. They must have some kind of signal to send out to their submarine, a way of each letting the other know they’re still alive. You destroy their radio set then the sub will assume they’re dead and then they might launch their missiles.”
“What is it you want then?”
“Just talk to Jennifer Masterton. If she’ll listen to anyone, it’s you. Tell her to talk to the sub and call it off, or stand it down or whatever. We’ll combine the two communities, we’ll re-open the power station. There will be no arrests, no trials, no punishments. We won’t even bother with truth and reconciliation. She can even stand for election if she wants.”
“And Quigley?”
“He won’t listen. That’s why you’ve got to speak to Masterton.”
“You want me to kill him?”
“Someone should. But no, if I want anything, it’s that submarine gone. Get it to stand down and let us get on with our lives. And whilst you’re there you can find this Doctor, and see if you can find out what you need to know.”
I ignored the obvious appeal to my own self-interest.
“And if Jen won’t help?” I asked.
“Then find the radio and try and talk to the sub yourself. Tell them it’s just women and children. Tell them to go and look for themselves. Probably they won’t listen, but you can try. There’s no time for half-measures now, it’s all or nothing, every minute of every day, doing until we die. Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us do that, then in a hundred years your descendants will have the luxury of leaving a dirty job for someone else to do. Here and now, that someone is you. So, will you try?”
I didn’t bother to answer. I’d already made up my mind, and the old man knew it. I will go to Caulfield Hall. I’ll find the Doctor and I’ll try and stop Quigley, but I have to go alone. I’m sorry, Sholto, but Quigley might recognise you and even if he didn’t, he’s bound to guess who you are. I can’t risk it.
I’ll leave this journal here. It’s too dangerous to risk taking. Dawn’s coming up and I have to leave. I’m not going to write any parting words. That would be tempting fate. Instead I will just wish you good luck, and see you down the road, soon.
Part 3:
Return, Reunion & Retribution
Day 136, Somewhere over Northeast England
Dawn, 5th August
It’s only been three days, so much has happened and I don’t know whether anything has changed. Where shall I start? At the safe house, I suppose.
The Return
The old man took me down from the safe house to where Gwen and Leon were keeping watch over the APC’s. I took a beat up Jaguar from a farmhouse down the road, and enough diesel to get me to Northumberland and back twice over. Gwen gave me a map with two routes marked on it, one that I should take, and one to very definitely avoid. She also marked a safe house about thirty miles from Caulfield Hall.
“Stick to the route. Stay in the safe house,” she said. “And don’t try any of your own shortcuts.”
Leon didn’t say anything at all. He just handed me a pistol, a little snub-nosed thing he’d had hidden in an ankle holster. The bike went onto the roof and I drove off without a backward glance.
It took almost exactly twelve hours to get thirty miles from Caulfield. It would have been quicker but, particularly as I got closer, I did try a few of my own half remembered shortcuts. I got lost twice, and once found the road abruptly disappeared amidst the detritus of where a horde had passed. I left the car five miles from the safe house, on a crest of a hill. I hoped that any undead that were attracted by the engine noise would have been dispersed downhill by gravity by the time I returned.
I didn’t stay in the safe house. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t marked out by flags. It was just an anonymous house in a dilapidated housing development, on the edge of a once prosperous mining town. I took one look at it and kept on for another hour until I was once again lost amongst the fields and hills.
The next morning, yesterday, I cycled the last twenty miles or so to Caulfield Hall. Usually my eyes stayed fixed to the road ahead, charting a route between the ubiquitous rubbish and occasional undead. The only time I glanced up was when a startled flock of birds would suddenly erupt from a tree or hedge. I’d make a note of the place and decide whether I should stop and fight, take a detour or just try and cycle past.
That’s why I didn’t see the hot air balloon until long after its occupants must have spotted me. That red dot against the blue background was somehow more terrifying than that first sight of the horde. The old man hadn’t mentioned it, and I’d not asked. I’d not asked him for any details about Caulfield. It was too late to do anything about it. Using the balloon as a marker, I cycled on.
The road I was on had two generous lanes with a grass verge on the left, and a three feet wide pedestrian footpath on the right. I remember when the footpath was put in. Ostensibly it was a safety measure, to reduce the danger to hikers forced to walk on the road. In reality the motivation behind it was to close down the footpaths that ran through nearby farmland, all of which belonged to the local party chairman.
At the time I had honestly admired the way that local funds were diverted and a pedestrian thoroughfare, marked down on the earliest of maps, was closed down. I saw the world as a game, one where no one knew the rules, but all was there to be won and lost just the same.
After half a mile on that road, I noticed a small but significant change. The few vehicles in the road had been pushed to the verge, leaving enough space for a vehicle far larger than a car, to drive through. After a brief examination I realised that tyres, wires, cables and anything else easily carried had been removed.
I kept glancing up at the balloon, on the lookout for some flash of light. I assumed they’d be using a heliograph or something equally primitive. It was stupid, seeing as I knew they had a radio that could communicate with a submarine. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Everything I saw brought back a dozen old memories, some good, some bad, all perilously distracting. That was why I almost missed the first field.
A chain was wrapped around the gate, a gleaming new padlock holding it closed. The key was attached to a piece of wire hanging from one of the gates crossbars. The implications of that were disturbing enough, what I saw inside made it worse. A heavy lorry had gouged deep ruts into the field. Those ruts, the ground about them and the inside of the hedge, were coated in a thin layer of ash, blown from the pyre in the fields centre. The bones were unmistakably human. The foot high grass growing wild in the tracks left by the lorry, suggested it had been done months ago.
The next field was the same, and the one after. In those fields the cremation had been incomplete. An arm or leg stuck out here or there and I could tell that these were zombies. But as for that first field, at that point, I could not say whether they were the bones of the living or the undead.
Then I came to the first barrier. It wasn’t a particularly impressive affair. Four cars had been turned on their side, lined up in a V-shape across the road with two overturned skips adding their weight behind them. The skips themselves were filled with an odd mixture of metal and tyres, which, I realised, must have come from the cars I’d passed earlier. The hedgerows on either side had been reinforced with a mismatched assortment of barbed wire and wood. Some old, some new, some weather proofed, some already beginning to rot.
The barricade looked like it would stop a pack of the undead. It didn’t look like it would hold up against a horde. What I was immediately struck by was the question of how the people inside, got out. Presumably there had to be another entrance, one where the barrier could be moved, but where? And why go to the trouble of clearing the road I’d just travelled along, if there wasn’t.
There were no bodies. No undead either. All was still and quiet save the cawing of a murder of crows. It was a grimly appropriate word for such an ill omen. I left the bike there and clambered up onto the barricade.
The fields beyond were full of wheat. Perhaps it was maize. Or oats. Unless it comes packaged in neatly labelled plastic, I can’t tell the difference. I think it was wheat, but there was something indefinable odd about it. Whilst I tried to work out what, I understood why the barricades had been built on that road. The fields inside the barrier belonged to Caulfield Hall, were farmed by the tenants living at Grovely Cross and watered by the irrigation system running under all the Masterton’s land. State of the art when it was installed in the 1960’s, there’d been talk of replacing it for as long as I can remember. Judging by the patchwork of wilted stalks and withered leaves dotted through the field, the system was finally falling apart.
I climbed down and, trying to work out what was wrong with the scene, headed towards Grovely Cross. It sounds as if it should be a village. If you looked at it on the map you might even think it was. In a place with fewer historical pretentions it would have been called Home Farm. Even that was too generous a description for the cluster of one-room flats, dormitories and, in recent years, mobile homes, bracketed by sheds, garages and barns, occupied by the legion of seasonal and temporary workers employed by the estate.
I didn’t go inside or linger too long, not with that balloon watching my every move. I didn’t want them to think I was a looter. I took just long enough to note the place was unoccupied and the farming machinery was parked up neatly in the yard around the back of the sheds, before continuing up towards the hall.
It was that machinery that gave me the key to understanding what was wrong about the place. I’d not seen a single soul. I may not know much about farming, but I do know it’s a lot of work, even more so now. Judging by the patches of withered crops and the weeds encroaching from the hedgerows no one was tending the crops, and hadn’t been for months.
Then I reached the second barricade. It was nothing like the first. I didn’t think that outer barrier would withstand the undead. I could be certain about this inner one. It was made of two rows of double linked chain fencing topped with razor wire sunk into three feet high concrete supports. It certainly looked impressive, but it had looked impressive on the M4. That barrier had broken. So would this one. But it was sturdy enough to keep me out. I turned north and followed the fence along.
It had come from the same stockpile used to reinforce the motorway. Or, to put it another way, diverted from reinforcing some other evacuation route. At most there couldn’t be more than a few miles worth ringing the Hall, but that’s not the point. Nor is that any evacuees safely reaching a muster point would have been poisoned anyway. Whoever had stolen it couldn’t have known that. And then I remembered who owned the land and wondered if, perhaps, they did.
Lost in that angry thought I didn’t hear the people behind me until a voice called out, “Alright mate. That’s close enough. Most people see the walls and take a hint.”
I turned around, slowly.
Reunion
Three men in army uniform stood twenty feet away. To be clear, they weren’t just wearing camouflage, they were in uniform, all matching,
all relatively clean, with boots polished and not a strap out of place. The weapons were the only concession to the changed times. They carried rifles, all of which were pointed at me, but across their backs were slung felling axes. And again, the uniformity of that was disturbing.
“We don’t give hand-outs. We don’t provide shelter. We don’t offer sanctuary. If you came here looking for that then you’re out of luck.” The soldier wore the chevrons of a sergeant on his sleeve.
“I grew up here,” I said.
“You a farmer, then?” the sergeant asked.
“No. No I worked in London.”
“That’s a pity. For you. We might have made an exception for a farmer.”
“But I grew up here. This is my home.”
“Not any more. It’s ours now.”
“No, you’re not getting it. I don’t mean I grew up on one of these farms. I mean I grew up there.” I pointed up the hill towards the house. “I’m Bill Wright. I grew up in the Hall with Jennifer Masterton.”
The sergeant’s eyes turned wary for a moment. “You sure? We will check that out, and if you’re lying then you’d be better off leaving now.”
From the way the guns were pointed at me, I doubted they would actually let me go.
“No, really. I grew up here. Just ask someone, they’ll vouch for me. There are people from before the outbreak still here, aren’t there?”
“Turn around, keep walking. We’ll follow,” he said, ignoring the question.
I didn’t say anything as we walked. I couldn’t think of anything I could ask that this sergeant might answer. The entrance was through a set of gates, made of that same prefabricated design, situated around an old track that led to the back of the estate.
We went through the gates, around the old stables, and in front of me lay the grounds and the Hall itself. The house was much the same, the old stone with its small windows, tall towers, wings and conservatories, all tacked on by successive generations with no thought for architecture, just driven by a need to die leaving the house larger than when they’d inherited it.
