Winter Smith (Book 2): The Secrets of France

by Strange, J. S.

  Zach began to say something, but somebody else spoke.

  “I hate to ruin this bonding session, but you’re in our supermarket.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The voice had come over the tannoy system. It was a woman’s voice, edgy and threatening, made even more so by the fact that there was no face to put to the sound.

  “What do we do?” Zach whispered, unmoving.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stand and leave.” The voice commanded, making them both jump. Zach stood, afraid of what might happen. Winter slowly stood afterwards, keeping a firm grip of the trolley. “Leave the items that you’re stealing behind.”

  “We’re not stealing!” Winter’s voice echoed around the room. “We’re entitled to this just as much as anyone else!”

  There was no response. Zach looked at Winter.

  “Should we go?”

  Winter nodded. She pushed the trolley and they ran from the clothing aisle, and down the main aisle towards an exit. As they were running, looking left and right, they didn’t see the group of people walk out of another aisle in front of them. Winter skidded to a halt, the trolley weighing her down and pulling her forwards.

  “Who are you?” Winter asked, when she had stopped. Her hands had begun to sweat, but she kept them tightly wrapped around the trolley bar.

  “Us?” A man with ginger hair asked. He was flanked by two women and a young boy. Winter wondered if they were a family. “You need to tell us who you are. You’re trespassing.”

  “I am not.” Winter stood her ground, though she felt scared. She couldn’t see weapons on the people in front of her, but the ginger man was burly and could easily beat the two of them up, if he so wished. Her thoughts flashed back to the leisure centre they had broken into back in London, to the people who had been driven crazy after being locked in for so long. “I’ve just come to get food. Like everybody else.”

  The man looked around him at the mostly full shelves. “Does this look like a free house? Does this look like we allow thievery?”

  “Excuse me, sir, but you don’t own this place,” Zach piped up.

  “NOBODY OWNS ANYTHING UNDER THIS NEW WORLD ORDER,” The man boomed, his voice magnified in the supermarket. “Now, leave your trolley behind and get out of here. Don’t ever come back, and nobody will be hurt.”

  Winter wouldn’t budge. “I’m sorry, sir, but many people have got away with food to survive. We will also be doing so.”

  She felt as though she was in some bizarre meeting, negotiating a contract of survival.

  The man looked surprised at being challenged by a young girl. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Winter Smith,”

  “Winter,” Zach gasped.

  “Well, we need to get out of here with this food, Zach.” Winter said, keeping her eyes on the ginger man. “So, I want to establish some form of connection. Tell me, can we strike a deal, Mr…?”

  “I’m not telling you a thing about myself, and you’d be clever not to talk about yourself, too.”

  “Listen, we’re leaving with at least half of this food. We’re all here to survive. We’ve all been screwed over and we should be working together, not against one another.”

  “Then you’ll understand why we won’t let you leave with our food,” The woman spoke. It was the voice from the tannoy.

  “We’ll strike a deal with you,” Winter said. “Are you a family?”

  The ginger man nodded. “Yes.”

  “Great. So you all want to survive together. If I had known I was stealing off a family, I wouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

  The man said nothing. Winter took that as a good sign.

  “Where are you going with this?” Zach whispered.

  Winter ignored him. “I’m just trying to survive, just like everybody else. I’m trying to get to The Union. Have you heard of The Union?”

  “They’re a myth,” the ginger man spat.

  Winter hoped that wasn’t true. “I’m going to find them. But first, to do that, I need food. For myself, Zach here, and the people we are staying with.”

  “More people?”

  Winter regretted saying the last part, but she couldn’t go back now. “Just one or two others. Nothing huge. Nothing to this scale. Please, just let us take a few of these things and we will be leaving. We’ll even show you where we got in, so you can block that off and make sure nobody gets in.”

  The man looked at his wife and his daughter. The young boy looked ill. Winter hoped he wasn’t infected. She had learnt her lesson with being compassionate to people back in London. The two orphans she had taken in turned out to be harbouring the disease throughout their escape, finally attacking when they got to the Thames.

  “Take what you need.” The ginger man resigned.

  Winter couldn’t believe her luck. She took out as much food as she could carry, whilst Zach took bathing lotions.

  “There’s an exit towards the corner of the store. It goes out front of the building. You can loop back around that way, too.”

  Winter nodded her understanding. “Thank you, so much.”

  “Leave. Before I change my mind.”

  Winter and Zach hurried across the remaining store. They got to the door that the man had told them about, and Zach found the way out. Winter looked back before leaving. The family were stood together, talking. It made Winter feel uneasy, but she also felt a pang of sorrow. The family were just like everybody else. They were afraid, troubled and only had each other to depend on. It reminded Winter that despite everything, the people she was with were her family, too.

  As she left the store, she thought that the family had been kind to help her. They knew that she was doing exactly what they were doing. Sometimes, you couldn’t beat old-fashioned conversation to escape a possible confrontation. Winter felt pleased with herself. Their raid of the supermarket had gone surprisingly well.

  Chapter Seventeen

  They arrived back at Nathan Smith’s apartment to find him sprawled out on the sofa, fast asleep and snoring. They headed into the kitchen, where a disgruntled Violet complained.

  “He’s been snoring all morning and nobody can get him to wake up. Honestly, Winter, your dad has some sort of drinking problem.”

  “I’ll get it out of him what’s happened to mum,” Winter said.

  The cupboards had been restocked with tinned soups, beans and vegetables and quick ready meals that could be plonked in a microwave. Everyone helped themselves to food straight away. Nobody knew when their next meal would come.

  “I hear The Union make artificial food.” Missy was saying, as she waited for her microwaved Sunday dinner to cool down.

  “The Union seem to be doing god damned everything,” Violet said, half way through vegetable soup. “Yet they can’t even be found.”

  “To be honest, we haven’t really looked for them yet,” Zach said, sat next to Violet. It was as if his conversation with Winter earlier hadn’t happened.

  The kitchen got lighter and lighter as they sat and talked and as the day outside wore on. At one point, they fell quiet when they heard somebody emerge from another apartment. When there was no sound they continued.

  “Do you think they’re going into the supermarket?” Missy asked.

  “Not likely after what happened to us,” Winter said.

  She explained the story to the group, and was halfway through when Nathan sauntered in looking tired.

  “Are you okay, dad?”

  “I’m fine,” Nathan whispered. “Did you get food?”

  “Yes. We got everything.”

  Nathan nodded. He rooted in the cupboard and took out tinned peas and began to prepare them. Winter looked at him as he did so. With shaking hands he barely held the tin. He jumped when the kettle boiled water. He was a man that had been scarred by something.

  “Dad.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Nathan left the room, leaving his peas to heat up on the stove.

/>   “You really need to talk to him.” Violet said. “Something has bothered him.”

  * * *

  That night, Winter told the others to remain in a bedroom whilst she spoke to her dad. Talking to him had always been difficult, but now was a lot harder. She feared what he was going to say. She feared being shouted at. She feared finding out what her dad had really become.

  “We’re going to be leaving soon, Dad.” It was true. They had discussed properly finding The Union. It was the next step for them. “We have to find sanctuary. We have to get to the bottom of this.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “If we don’t make the change then who will?”

  “This is the change,” Nathan spoke, hollowed out and staring straight ahead. “It’s a brand new world order. There’s nothing anybody can do.”

  “The Union are trying to get things back to how they should be.”

  “Stay out of what you don’t know, kid.”

  For a moment, it felt as though Winter’s father was back in the room. He was talking to her like he used to talk to her: with disregard and no respect. Once, Winter would have lost patience and left the room. Now, she saw it as an opportunity.

  “When you left me, where did you go?”

  Nathan looked at her. “Left you?”

  “Left me behind, yes.” Winter nodded. “When I couldn’t find you at the party, I thought you had either died there or you would have escaped. I didn’t know what could have happened. But I’ve found you here now, and I want to know what happened to you.”

  Nathan shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Her father could be so stubborn. She felt like shaking him, telling him that his information was important, that it mattered. “Tell me, Dad.”

  “We escaped from the bedroom.” Nathan said. “Got to France. Now I’ve ended up in this shit hole.”

  “Dad. Come on. Talk. How did you escape home?”

  “I kept Olivia by me, and we got into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. The dead were…they were everywhere. It was really horrendous. They came from nowhere and bit into our friends and killed so many. They ruined our night.”

  It was typical of her father to look at things this way. Winter began to realise he hadn’t changed. He had just become guarded, afraid to speak about what had happened, as that would confirm it was true.

  “We could hear them on the door. First they screamed at us to let them in. But Olivia wouldn’t allow me to do it. I said it might be you. I thought I could hear you. But Olivia wouldn’t let me open that door again.”

  “I didn’t call for you,” Winter said. “I didn’t call for you at all.”

  “Oh,” Nathan said. She thought she saw disappointment in his lined face. But it was gone in a flicker. His mind didn’t dwell on his relationship with his daughter, like Winter’s had so many times. “Then their screams stopped.” He had brushed over Winter’s inadvertent comment on her family relationship. Anybody else would have screamed for their family. Winter had been set on finding Connor. “Then all we heard was groaning, banging on the door and distant screams. We knew something had gone horribly wrong. I prayed it was just some sick prank for that new TV show. But of course it wasn’t.”

  “Not everything is about fame and television.”

  “I know that, I’m not stupid.” Nathan spat. “Then we heard the choppers. They were outside. Did you see them?”

  “I did.”

  “Yes,” Nathan nodded, his eyes glazed over as he remembered his escape. “We got to our balcony and we leapt. We got inside and they told us everything was going to be fine. They said, ‘you’re safe now, Mrs Smith. Mr Smith, you’re safe.’ And that was that. We fled the party. We fled our homes.”

  “You fled me.”

  “We couldn’t be responsible for you. It was every man for themselves.”

  “Right.”

  “I sense resentment.”

  “None at all.”

  Nathan didn’t elaborate or push the problem. “When we got to Paris, some of our guests disappeared. They were taken off somewhere. We were told they went to survival camps. We assumed that was where we were set to go. But then we saw her. Her name was V. She didn’t reveal her face to us, which we both thought was rude. But she told us she knew who we were. She sent commiserations to us for losing you to the dead, and we wept, fearing we had lost you.”

  Winter felt odd. V had known they had a daughter. Smith was a common last name. Did V know who she was?

  “We were taken to a shop front on a high-street in the middle of Paris called Woolworth Lock,” Nathan said. “This shop was empty, but was on a street full of brand new businesses and amazing terraced apartments above them. It really was a beautiful street. By this point, Paris looked as safe as it could be.

  “We were told that everybody in V’s government were fighting for the cause, and the dead wouldn’t be a problem, and France would always be safe. Paris was a city of new opportunities, of new possibilities, and V wanted us to be part of it. They gave us a shop. You know how much we wanted a shop.”

  “It was your dream,” Winter said, feeling pride. “It was always your dream. You worked bloody hard. I always said you could have got what you wanted.”

  “Rent was high in London and we didn’t want to take the risk. I never told you that.”

  “You never told me anything.”

  “You’re my daughter. I wasn’t supposed to.” Nathan fiddled with a loose thread on the blanket he had wrapped around himself. “We were given a free house and a free shop, and all we had to do was design our jewellery and it would be made. We did so, throwing ourselves into work to forget what we had lost…to forget…never mind. Within two weeks we were up and running. We signed a deal with V and her government that stated we would be here for twelve months, and then the contract would be reviewed. If we did well it would be renewed. The usual stuff. Of course, we missed one fatal thing.”

  Winter waited for Nathan to speak, but he didn’t. She sensed this was the bit she was waiting for. “Which was?”

  “We agreed to not being paid. We made multi-million pound deals that just came to us so easily, and we sold to so many people, we should have been suspicious. But we were living on cloud nine. Then we found out V was harbouring our money, and we weren’t set to get any of it. We were fed bullshit. ‘Oh, the government earn the money for twelve months to fund the brand new government movement and the riddance of the dead.’ We accepted that at first, but then it got worse.

  “‘Sorry you haven’t been paid Mr Smith, but you signed a contract.’” Nathan shook his head. “Then they told me to stop calling altogether and to be thankful for what the government were giving us. Apparently, everything was paid for us so we didn’t need money. But this was our money. Then shops began to close on the high street as more survivors arrived. We didn’t get it. More people meant more business, which meant better prospects.”

  “Naturally,” Winter said. They heard a chain flush and someone leave the bathroom to the bedroom.

  “We began to talk with people who were on the street around the same time as us, and we found out they were all having the same problems. But they weren’t speaking up. We didn’t know why. Something had to change. V couldn’t take our money and get away with it. We just wouldn’t allow it. So we spoke up and that, Winter, is where we went wrong.”

  Nathan abruptly got to his feet and began to pace the room. Winter bit her lip. She hated to see her father so agitated.

  “When we began to push, V began to push back. Only she pushed back a lot harder than we thought she would. We began to learn what V was really doing. Taking people for all they had so she could fund her sick, sadistic new world.”

  “You believe it?”

  “Of course I believe it, Winter.” Nathan snapped. “I saw what was happening first hand.”

  “How?”

  “Next door to us was a bakery. Lovely woman who couldn’t be happier that she had been aske
d to help the economy and given all of this for free. We saw the Blitzers go in and shoot her. She wasn’t dead. Not at first.”

  “At first?”

  “By this point, they didn’t care who saw what they were up to.” Nathan sighed. “I guess they had more people lined up who were oblivious and wanted their businesses set up. But outside in the street, locked up in a cage on the back of a lorry, were the dead. The woman from the bakery was dragged out, bloody and bruised. I watched as Olivia wept besides me. They took out the dead and she was set upon in seconds. She didn’t even wake up as the dead again.”

  “But I thought everyone turned?”

  “Maybe she was too close to death already?” Nathan shrugged. “Maybe she died just before the first bite was given. Who knows? She didn’t move again.”

  Winter pictured the scene. A dark night, orange Blitzers outside, the dead feasting on a beaten up woman. “That must have been horrible for you.”

  “It was,” Nathan nodded. “Two days later we lost our business.”

  “And you lost mum?”

  Nathan shook his head, looking sick. “I haven’t lost her.”

  “I know. Tell me.”

  Nathan stopped his pacing and looked around at the unorganised room. Winter smelt an old meal and peering over the sofa she saw two dirty dishes piled on top of one another. One had begun to rot. She felt sick.

  “They burst into our apartment. We lost everything that night. Blitzers came armed with guns, firing into our doors, smashing our windows. I thought we were going to die. I spotted the dead waiting outside, and I refused to die like that woman next door.” Nathan looked angry. Winter remembered him getting angry before and finally bursting. He had scared her. “I grabbed Olivia and we escaped downstairs, through our ruined jewellery store that was never ours, and out into the back garden. We climbed a wall and since then we were on the run.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “We found a man,” Nathan said. “His name was Cedric French.”