by Frank Tayell
“The hospital? I’d have thought that’s the last place you’d want to destroy.”
“Ramps,” Tam said. “We needed a building the zombies could walk into. There’s ammunition in the barracks, and there’s a coal depot by the waterfront.”
“Coal? That will be useful this winter. Would you like to go back? Either tomorrow, or when the helicopter arrives?”
“To Ireland? No, no I don’t think so. I’m glad some others survived, but everyone I knew before February is dead. Ireland is a memory to me, and if I went back, I’d only be reminded of those I’ve lost. I’ll stick with the professor, and follow her path.”
“Using speakers in trucks, that’s how Dernier lured the undead here?” Bill asked.
“He copied my idea,” Tam said.
“Why, though? What did he want?”
“What does anyone want?” Tam asked. “Power and glory, same as it ever was. That man was filled with hate, too. Wanted to spread it around. You heard the story about his brother?”
“Trapped in a prison?”
“I think that was his story,” Tam said. “I think that’s where he and his people came from. They were left for dead, and perhaps their souls died there. But he is dead now?”
“He is,” Bill said.
“Then that’s one less problem to worry about.” He leaned forward, glancing up and down the corridor. “Until someone fills his shoes.”
“He had a lot of followers, then?” Bill asked.
“Who can say?” Tam said, standing up. “Good luck with Dunkirk. It’s the beaches to the south. You can’t miss them. There’s boats lined up for miles. And check out Dundalk. I have to report to the Assembly. They’ll want to know how many of our lorries and buses still work.”
“Thank you, Tam.”
“I’ll see you before you leave,” he said, and headed off down the corridor.
Bill drummed his fingers against the bench, and closed his eyes, replaying the conversation, then the meeting with the Assembly. It wasn’t what had been said, but what hadn’t been said that made him wonder whether trade would even be possible.
He had three weeks. Three weeks to return here in a helicopter. Three weeks to organise a plan for trade. What if the French survivors didn’t want to share their food? If not, then there was only one chance for the people in Ireland. He’d spent many a long night on Anglesey, talking with Kim, with Sholto, with Mary, and on his own, going over maps and books, discounting one place after another. They didn’t have the luxury of time. No, if Creil couldn’t supply them with enough food to last until the spring, then only one course was open to them. He rolled the idea around in his mind, desperately searching for an alternative.
Chapter 24 - I Can See Your House From Up Here
Île Saint-Maurice, Creil
Chester leisurely wandered the walkways, relishing the wonder of his artificially restored sight as much as the wondrous sights of this odd little island. He felt secure, content, and not just in relief at having survived another day’s nightmare of unprecedented danger. An odd sense of belonging, of homecoming, had swept over him in a way that highlighted how transitory had been their life in the Tower. The people were wrong, of course, but in the handful he saw, he could imagine Nilda or Tuck, Jay or Kevin. Perhaps it was just homesickness coupled with the awareness that his old home, by now, would have been trampled to dust by the undead. On that basis, it was a thread of thought best not pulled.
He pushed the half-moon glasses back up his nose, and peered at the street sign ahead of him. It had been painted in white on a red car-bonnet, attached to the scaffolding with blue plastic-wrapped wires.
“Red, white, and blue. I wonder if that’s a coincidence.”
He spoke loudly enough for the pair of children standing by the ladder to hear him. Though they both glanced around, they didn’t speak, but clambered upward, to the next level.
The words on the sign were in French, but since he wasn’t looking for anything in particular, it didn’t matter which way he went. Not wanting the children to think he was following them, he headed to the ladder and climbed down.
Ground level was as gloomy and dank as a sewer. The gutters had been extended and expanded from their original depth, though they were overflowing. Presumably they led straight to the river. That, he decided, was something else on which it was best not to dwell.
He was on a wide street that had been turned into a narrow alley by a camper van on one side, a truck on the other, and then a minibus next to that. Through the drawn curtain on the minibus’s windshield, he saw that the driver and passenger seats had been replaced with a wooden table and a trio of matching chairs. In the back were a wardrobe, an ancient cabinet, three narrow armchairs, and the same number of hammocks, currently secured to the roof. The side-windows were covered in paintings, though it was too dark to tell whether they were priceless rescues or cheap prints. On top of the minibus was a garden shed, supported by scaffolding-poles secured to a shipping container on the opposite side of the street. The shed’s door opened and an elderly woman peered out. Chester nodded, smiled, and kept walking, doing his best not to laugh. Yes, he could see himself living like this. And if he did ever live in a converted truck, he’d certainly install a garden shed on the roof! The humour evaporated after a few more paces when he realised that the elderly woman had chosen elevation over comfort to remain safe from the undead.
More vehicles lined the road beyond, but he ignored the windows and concentrated on the licence plates, marking off one European country after another.
The scaffolding walkways above were so dense, with the gaps between the vehicles so increasingly narrow, it was impossible to judge where the buildings were either side. From the surface beneath his feet, he was no longer walking on a road, but on some paved courtyard.
From ahead came raised voices. The door to a camper van flew open. Starwind jumped out. She stormed along the alley, spun around, and continued shouting at the van. One young man, then another stepped outside. They were both about Starwind’s age. The taller of the two was dressed in mended dungarees over a cracked leather jacket, while the other wore ill-fitting jeans tucked into thigh-high boots and a brown overcoat, buttoned tight. Even though Chester didn’t understand what they were saying, the way Starwind remonstrated with them, the way they were protesting in reply, showed she knew them well.
Abruptly, Starwind threw up her hands, turned on her heel, and stormed away and towards Chester. He stepped aside, but she ignored him, marching straight past. After a brief internal debate, he followed her. Just as she reached the camper van with the garden shed on the roof, she stopped.
“What?” she demanded of him.
“Is everything okay?” Chester asked.
“Did you hear what I said to them?” she asked.
“I heard it, but I didn’t begin to understand it. Sorry, I really don’t understand French. Friends of yours, are they?”
She fumed, chewing her lip. “No,” she finally said. “They are not friends. Not now. Not anymore.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“With you? No,” she said.
“Good,” he said. She frowned. “Because I’ve a ton of questions,” Chester added. “Like where did all these vehicles come from?”
“What? Oh, a camping ground.”
“And the shed?” he asked, pointing at the wooden extension above them. The door to the shed opened, and the old woman peered out. She gave them both a stern glare, followed by a flurry of sterner words.
Starwind gave a brief reply. “This way, come,” she said.
Chester smiled at the old woman, then followed Starwind down the narrow alley. “Are we in trouble?” he asked.
“You are,” Starwind said. “You were disturbing her.”
“Ah. Sorry about that. So these all came from a campsite? Where?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“It might do,” he said. “We’re leaving first thing tom
orrow. We could do with all the information we can get about the world between here and the coast.”
“You’re going already?” she asked, surprise briefly replacing anger.
“We’ve our own families and friends, and they’ll be looking for us. Dangerous task, that. The sooner we’re reunited, the safer they’ll be. It’s a nice place, this. One of the best I’ve seen.”
“And you are an expert?” she said, her voice dripping with scorn.
“As it happens, compared to everyone else on this planet, yes. I spent a good portion of this year looking for other survivors out in the wasteland of England and Wales. Seen a lot of little communities. Reinforced farms and office blocks, that kind of thing. Then there’s Anglesey and London, of course, but those aren’t a fair comparison. On Anglesey, we had electricity. In London, we had the world’s most famous fortress. This place, though, it’s a labour of love and sweat.”
“Vive la république,” she said, with marginally more scorn than before, then resumed her angry march down the narrow laneway.
He was dealing with a teenager so decided to channel Nilda and change tack. “Why don’t you give me a tour?” Chester said, jogging to catch up. “It’ll make a great story for the children when I get back.”
“You have children?” she asked, slowing but not stopping.
“About fifty of them,” he said. “Rescued them from Kent a while back.”
“Ah.”
“So show me around,” Chester said. “This place is impressive. There’s a lot we could learn from it.”
“Like?”
“Like how do you grow food? Where’s the water come from?”
“Water comes from the sky when it rains, the river when it doesn’t. Food came from farms during the summer, and from… from… I don’t know the word. Inside farms, with light and heat.”
“Hydroponics? Greenhouses?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “What more do you want to know?”
“Well, like with hydroponics, are you using LEDs, or mirrors and daylight? If the latter, what type of crops do you grow?”
“I don’t have time.”
“Why not? The battle’s over, we’ve won, right?”
“A battle, not the war,” she said. “I have to go to the others.”
“You mean your dead friends?”
“No. The other watchtower,” she said, finally stopping.
“There’s another?”
“In the west. I wanted eight watchtowers, surrounding the city, guarding against evil. Eight would have been perfect. Four would have been enough. Four would have kept everyone safe. No one wanted to join. I had two. East and west. No one knows what has happened to the west.”
“Ah, well, dusk isn’t far off, so you can’t leave until dawn. We’re heading north and west, so we might as well travel together at least as far as that. How far is it?”
“Vingt kilomètres. In miles? I don’t know in miles.”
“What about in English?”
She gave another scoffing laugh. “Twenty kilometres.”
“Well, dark is a half hour away. You won’t get there tonight. Wait until morning, and travel with us. You wanted to recruit those two men?”
“I am desperate,” she said. “I mean… I mean…”
“No, I know what you mean,” he said. “Most people are out in the town, hunting down zombies, while those two weren’t. Says a lot, that.”
“Why do you want to help me?”
“Same reason we helped today,” he said. “We have to work together, all of us. We’ve a saying in our community: we’re the help that comes to others. It’s too easy to hide in the dark, to hope the nightmare will end, but that’s always been a false hope. It caused so many deaths from suicide and starvation, disease and the other kind of infection. No, the only chance for an individual to survive is to risk their lives and hope that others will do the same for them.”
“What good is it to possess the whole universe if you are its only survivor?” Starwind said.
“Precisely,” Chester said.
“No, that is what Rousseau said. What the general said. Why we had to create this town. Old ideas and dead men’s words. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”
“Rousseau? He was one of your philosophers, wasn’t he? Something to do with your revolution. I’ve been reading a bit of history. More about Napoleon than what came before, but I remember the name. So, people had this idea a few hundred years ago. I guess it’s true when they say there’s nothing new under the sun.” He grinned. She didn’t. “Look, since we’re travelling together tomorrow, you don’t need to spend the rest of the evening recruiting companions, which means you’ve time to give me the tour. Show me why you think this island is such a bad idea.”
She weighed that up. Finally she smiled, though it was with a calculating grin. “Fine. I’ll show you. We have to go up.”
A ladder led to a walkway, to another ladder, another walkway, then to the crane. Starwind sprang onto the ladder running inside, scampering up a dozen rungs before Chester had managed three. After twenty rungs, he stopped looking up. After forty, he almost turned back. By the time he reached the top, he was exhausted.
“Are you okay, old man?” Starwind asked.
“Oh, fine, fine,” he said. “Just thought my day’s exertions were over after that church.” He sat on the narrow platform, catching his breath while he looked around. He couldn’t see a radio antenna. “Do many people come up here?”
“Apparently not,” Starwind said. “Dr VanHausen says it isn’t safe.”
“She does? Ah. So go on then, tell me the story of this place.”
“Tell me why you were reading about Napoleon.”
“To win the heart of the woman I love,” he said. “Your turn.”
“What’s there to say?” she asked. “This is the island. People live here. Fuel is stored in the warehouse over there, with the vehicles. Food is over there. Tools and other equipment there.” She pointed east of the river.
“They’re not stored on the island?” Chester asked.
“Not enough room,” Starwind said. “There’s not enough water. Not enough soap. Not even enough food.”
“There isn’t?”
“How can there be? They won’t go out to gather more. Everyone wants to stay here, stay safe.” She leaned over the narrow railing and peered at the scaffolding now far below.
“Sounds a bit like Anglesey,” he said. “What about west of the river?”
“Zombies and ruins,” she said.
“No storehouses?”
She shrugged, and leaned out further.
“How did you end up here?”
“That’s my mother’s house,” she said, pointing southward.
“You were here during the outbreak, and you stayed? You didn’t think of leaving?”
“We don’t run away. We’re not cowards.”
“And by we, you mean your friends at the watchtowers?”
“Our clan,” she said. Her shoulders slumped. She sat on the cracked wooden planks. “And now they’re dead. All dead.”
“Why call them watchtowers?” Chester asked, skirting around what he really wanted to ask.
“There was a story,” she said. “People fighting evil. That’s what life has become.”
“Sure. I understand that. I’ve been reading a lot about emperors and kings, knights and soldiers. I suppose that’s natural enough seeing as we lived in a real castle. All of us are looking for stories that’ll make sense of this nightmare.”
“That is it. It is a nightmare. No one knows how or why it started. One minute everything was normal, the next planes crashed out of the sky. Zombies appeared in the street. It was the apocalypse, Armageddon, but praying did no good. Evil is everywhere.”
“Evil like Dernier?” Chester asked.
“He was evil, yes, but he is not the only evil. He was the figurehead. The leader.”
“He escaped from a prison?”
> “I think so. That’s what they said while they held me captive. They escaped. Him and his gang. Escaped because he was told they would rule the world.”
“A handful of them?”
“He didn’t think so. He thought there were more.”
“Ah. Do you know how many?” Chester asked.
“They didn’t let me ask questions,” Starwind said. “They only wanted answers, but they couldn’t stop talking. Men like that, they can’t.”
“And they wanted to know where the ammunition was?”
“The ammunition, the food. My mother hid it after Dernier arrived. She didn’t like him. Didn’t trust him.”
“Wise woman,” Chester said. “Those two lads we found in the barn. They’re part of your clan?”
“Featherblade and Sunbright,” she said. She sniffed. “Enzio and Baptiste. Enzio and I went to the same school. He met Baptiste at university. A week after the outbreak, a column of refugees arrived at the airfield. The ghouls followed. Enzio saved my life. I saved Baptiste’s, and he saved the general’s. Hundreds died. That’s when they finally abandoned the airfield, when everyone moved here. And when we started the clan.”
“You started your clan before this had been built?”
“No. Yes. The general wanted to protect the town, the entire town, and the airfield and the countryside beyond. Too many ghouls. Too much…” She snapped her fingers. “Chaos. Too much chaos. He ordered everyone back here, to the island. I could see what he was doing. My mother saw it, too. It was obvious.”
