Surviving The Evacuation (Book 10): The Last Candidate

by Frank Tayell

  The litter of spent cartridges and discarded magazines told us where the shooter had been.

  “You didn’t wait until five,” she said.

  “I never was good at counting,” I said.

  “Those are nine millimetre casings,” she said.

  “Oh?” I wasn’t really listening. I’d been so focused on the hail of bullets and the approaching undead that, while we were in cover, I’d not taken in what lay beyond the house. Adjacent to the building’s side-wall was a square of lawn slightly lower than the surrounding area, ringed by a narrow ditch, and faced by a line of wooden benches. It had probably been a bowls pitch, though it was now flooded, covered in a thin layer of leaves and lilies. Beyond that was a row of concrete barbecues, a cluster of trestle tables, and sun-faded recycling bins that stretched down to a narrow road that led from the house into the main site. I’d thought that the campsite consisted mainly of the chalets on the hill and the static caravans near the house, but that was only a fraction of the accommodation available. Below us, sloping down to a still invisible sea were the roofs of hundreds of static caravans, more wooden chalets, and at least two-dozen mobile homes.

  “I can’t see any signs,” Lorraine said. “Do you think they put barbed wire around the entire caravan site?”

  “Maybe, but it wasn’t Bishop’s people,” I said. “It was done by whoever drove those vehicles here.” On the road that ran up to the house was a line of cars. Grime covered the windows, and half of the tyres were flat, but they were close enough together that they’d been parked, not simply abandoned. “Probably one of his people made it here with a group of others. They built the barricades before they learned there were people on Anglesey. That’s how they knew of this place.” Even as I said it, I knew there was something wrong with that theory, something that kicked at the edge of memory.

  There was a loud burst of gunfire from near the changing room.

  “Time to run and keep running,” Lorraine said. I didn’t disagree, though we walked along the wall of the house, ducking low as we eased under a boarded-up window.

  We were ten feet from the end of the wall, with the front of the property more clearly in view, when a figure ran around the side of the building. It was a woman, another one of the jurors, and she held a submachine gun in her hands. I swung the shotgun around as she tried to bring it to bear. I fired. The pellets from two cartridges ripped into her, almost tearing her apart.

  “The cars,” Lorraine said as she ran to the twitching corpse and searched it for ammo. I’d turned my attention to the front of the house. The door was ajar, but there was no sign of anyone else.

  “Bill! The cars! The two at the front!”

  I turned to look. Unlike the rest, the front two vehicles had clean windows, and the tyres, at least those I could see, were properly inflated. Between us and them was a concrete blockhouse with a thick wooden door held closed with a new padlock. The roof was of red tile in a faux-colonial style, the stonework matching the silent fountain in front of the house.

  There was a gasp from behind us. The zombie that Bishop’s guard had shot in the legs had kept crawling after us. Now it was ten feet away. I ran back to it. Gripping the shotgun by the barrel, I slammed the wooden stock down onto its skull. Once. Twice. There was a snap of bone, and the softer crack of wood as the gun’s stock fractured.

  “Go!” I said to Lorraine.

  We ran to the concrete blockhouse. I paused to check the lock, and quickly hammer on the door. I heard nothing. I slammed the butt of the shotgun into the lock. The wooden stock, which had cracked when I’d used it as a club on that prone zombie, splintered. The weapon was useless, so I rammed the barrel between the lock and bolt, and levered until the fitting came free. There was no prisoner inside, only five jerry cans. I picked up the nearest. It was a quarter full.

  “I recognise those,” Lorraine said. “Those containers came from a garage near Menai Bridge. They’re the ones Heather left up and down the coast for people who followed the maps left in the safe houses. We thought they’d all been used up the last time we—”

  A fountain of paint sprayed from thick concrete wall. I swung around, as I dragged the revolver free. There was a figure in the doorway of the house: the middle-aged woman who’d stunned me. She had a hunting rifle in her hands and was fumbling with the bolt. Lorraine raised the submachine gun and fired a single shot. The woman disappeared, though I don’t think Lorraine had hit her.

  Still carrying the fuel can, we ran around the blockhouse, and towards the two clean cars.

  “They were planning to escape,” Lorraine said. “Look at the stuff in the back.”

  The car’s rear was filled with bags. “Do you have any matches?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I smashed the rear window and grabbed a bag just as another shot came from the house. The bullet hit the car behind me. I ignored it, emptying the bag on the ground. It only contained clothes. Another shot came from the house. This one hit glass. Ignoring the poorly aimed shots, I searched the bags, dumping their contents on the ground. Underneath one, I saw a tyre iron. I grabbed it, though it wasn’t what I was looking for. “Why two cars? Why only two? Where did they think they’d go?” I said as I tore open another bag.

  “What are you looking for?” Lorraine asked, firing a shot at the house.

  “I’m mindful of Rob,” I said. “He thought we were setting him up to die, and I’m sure he had a plan of escape. Or he thought he did. Then there’s that boat they used to get over here from Anglesey. Someone planned to flee here, and right now, I’m more interested in where they were going than who they are.”

  “Can we drive away?” Lorraine asked. “No. No keys. Can you see any keys?”

  Another shot came from the house. This bullet hit the car’s side window, but I’d found what I was looking for, a bag that contained a camping stove, saucepans, and a tin of rainproof matches.

  “No keys,” I said, finally ducking down behind the car. I tore a strip from my coat and ripped the top off the plastic fuel can. “Besides, where would we drive? No, what I want is someone to answer some questions and some time to search the house, but we can’t take the risk.”

  There was another shot from the house. The front windscreen shattered. Even then, I hesitated. Objectively the result of what I planned was no different to shooting these people, yet it felt different. But they had two cars ready to aid an escape. Some of them, probably those who didn’t subscribe to Bishop’s new religion, had prepared a way out, and so must have a destination in mind. They couldn’t be allowed to reach it. They couldn’t be allowed to live and so remain a threat to our future.

  “No. We can’t take the risk.” I struck a match, and lit the rag. “Cover me.”

  Tyre iron in one hand, jerry can in the other, I limped across the open ground towards the house. I heard Lorraine fire. Then I heard a scream from inside, and realised the gunfire from the rear of the house had slackened. The undead had reached the building. It didn’t matter. A bullet whistled past my head. I hurled the fuel can with its burning rag towards the house. The container hit the wall. The burning rag fell out, but the can fell close to it. The vapour caught. It wasn’t quite the inferno I’d wanted, but it would have to do. Another bullet sung through the air, too close for comfort. Lorraine returned fire, and I turned around, running back to the cars.

  By the time I was in cover, the fire had spread to the wooden boards covering the nearest windows.

  “Do we wait?” Lorraine asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Just then, I noticed the zombies at the side of the house. When the gunfire from inside had stopped, the creatures had begun drifting away from the changing room door. There were three making their slow way towards the line of cars. “No, we don’t wait. We get out of here and get back to Anglesey.”

  Leaving the house to burn, and its occupants to the undead, we ran.

  Chapter 23 - The Steep Stairs

  But after less than a minu
te, we slowed the run to a quick walk. The undead wouldn’t catch us, and the caravan site ahead of us appeared completely deserted. Adrenaline was wearing off. Exhaustion, thirst, and hunger were setting in, along with the self-doubt that was their ever-constant companion. Setting fire to the house with its occupants inside had not been done in a moment of mad revenge. It had been a calculated act, and I wasn’t regretting it so much as what it meant about the person I’d become. I tried to focus on the present as a distraction from introspective recrimination.

  We passed a signpost for a camping site, another for a wash-block, one for a shop. I almost stopped in my tracks when I saw the sign for a beachfront walk. Instead, I picked up my pace and Lorraine did the same. We saw no undead. From the broken doors, the caravans had long-since been searched and left empty.

  The road curved inland. There was another sign directing us down an alley between two sets of wooden chalets. At the end, razor wire glinted in the dim sunlight peeking through the thinning clouds, but there was a gap in the wire, and in that gap were two figures. Bishop, and a man I thought was another one of the jurors.

  Lorraine raised her submachine gun, but I pushed the barrel down.

  “Not yet, not until we’re outside. We don’t want the zombies to know where we are.”

  Even as I spoke, it became moot. The juror saw us, raised his weapon, and fired. I recognised the loud blast of a shotgun, but we were a hundred yards away. Lorraine fired a single shot that did just as little damage. Bishop and the juror ducked out of sight. Lorraine and I ran once more.

  The gap in the wire was at a wooden stile with a trio of boards lying loose on the ground. The boards slotted together, covering the gap when the entrance wasn’t in use. There was no sign of Bishop, but there was a well-worn trail in the grass outside. Then came a shot, and another, and both from further down the trail.

  “Bishop,” Lorraine said.

  “Shooting at zombies,” I said. I hefted the tyre-iron. I’d have preferred my sword. It had been a well-balanced weapon, and among the best I’ve found since I left London, but the tyre-iron had the comfort of familiarity. Against a shotgun, however, I wished I had more than the half-loaded revolver digging into my side.

  Lorraine went first, submachine gun raised. No more shots came, and we didn’t see Bishop or the juror before we reached the spot where they’d fired. A zombie lay on the ground. It had taken a shotgun blast to the groin. The creature still thrashed its arms and snapped its mouth, but its legs were useless. It raised a languid hand, clawing at Lorraine. I stepped forward, batted its arm out of the way, and swung the tyre-iron down on its skull.

  “I bet they left it like that deliberately,” Lorraine said. I wasn’t sure. I’m still not. Bishop’s mantra was of peace, though of a particularly violent kind. Perhaps the man hadn’t originally intended for anyone to die, and perhaps he’d not known what Paul and the others were doing. It hardly mattered, now.

  We continued following the track as it bent and twisted, heading away from the campsite, and downhill.

  I heard the sea before I saw it, but the bay came into sight a moment later. It was a shallow inlet with an eighty-foot stretch of beach, but you’d have to move a ton of rocks before you found the sand underneath.

  The track ended at the top of a steep cliff. A few dozen feet from us was a winding staircase, but only the top and bottom were visible among the craggy rocks. The stairs ended at a concrete pier that stretched out into the sea. The tide was out, but the boat tied halfway along floated on water. It was a sailing craft with a small outboard motor, not too dissimilar to the boat in which Kim and I had taken to Elysium.

  “Can you see them?” Lorraine asked.

  “I can hear them,” I said. “There, the stairs.” There was the sound of feet slipping on rough-cut spray-covered steps. Before I reached the first, a shotgun’s blast rent the air and pellets flew up in front of me. The angle of the stairs, taken with the steep cliffs into which they were cut meant that Bishop and his juror couldn’t see us. Nor could we see them, not without risking getting blown apart.

  Lorraine inched forward. The submachine gun’s barrel almost came to bear when there was another blast from the shotgun. Stone chips flew from the top-most step. I grabbed Lorraine’s arm and pulled her back.

  “We’ve got to stop them,” she said.

  “Shoot the boat,” I said. “Can you manage it?”

  “From here? Probably, but that boat’s our way home.”

  “Shoot it. Sink it. If they get to it, they’ll get away. They’ll disappear into a Welsh valley or an English city. A year from now they’ll return, seeking revenge. We have to stop them. That means stopping them from escaping.”

  Lorraine raised the gun, aiming down its length. She fired a single shot that went into the sea. She crouched down, took aim again. This time, she hit the boat. She fired one measured shot after another, and almost all hit their target. Another blast came from the shotgun, but it didn’t come close. I thought Bishop had two choices, wait for us to run out of ammo and then run for the boat, or charge up the stairs. I was wrong. All he had to do was wait. As Lorraine fired, I looked back the way we’d come. Two of the undead had appeared on the track. I don’t know whether they’d followed us from the caravan site or had followed the sound of the shotgun blast that had nearly cut that creature in two, but they were now heading towards the sound of Lorraine’s submachine gun.

  “Is it sinking?” I asked, taking a step away from her.

  “Probably,” she said. She looked up at me, and then along the track at the undead. “Oh.”

  “Watch for Bishop to come up those stairs,” I said. We were trapped between the undead and the cliffs. Without the boat, our only way out was down the stairs and across the beach towards what had to be a road access-point on the other side. We couldn’t do that until Bishop was dead. I raised the tyre-iron, and waited for the creatures to draw near. They hadn’t been undead for long. Their clothing still had shape. The colour on the thin blue scarf around the nearest zombie’s head was still discernible. I wondered if Paul or Greg had fed the living to the undead, saving the bullet to trade for a pint at Markus’s pub.

  Other than the scarf, the woman had died wearing thin trousers and a long-sleeved t-shirt. There were no shoes on her feet. Had they fallen off? Or had she been abducted at night, from somewhere indoors, somewhere she thought she was safe. The zombie twisted its head, and I thought I saw a flash of gold on that blue scarf. Was that woman Sorcha Locke? Though her clothing was still discernible, her features weren’t. The lower jaw was missing, her face a ruin of scar and ragged skin. She staggered closer, and I ducked, swinging low, knocking her from her feet. I stepped in and stabbed the chisel-point down through her eye. It might have been Sorcha Locke, but I’ll never know for sure.

  The other zombie lurched closer. Its face was still almost human, but utterly unknown to me. Its arms hung by its sides, but barely moved as I swung the tyre-iron down on its skull. It collapsed. We were alone. All was suddenly silent.

  Silent?

  I turned around. Lorraine still crouched by the stairs, the submachine gun shifting between the bottom of the steps and the boat.

  “I’m down to ten rounds,” she hissed as I approached, “but the boat’s sinking.”

  I leaned forward so I could see. The craft looked a little lower on the water.

  “If they run for the boat, I say we should let them,” Lorraine said. “They’ll get a mile out to sea before they sink.”

  “Worth a try,” I said. “Give up, Bishop. It’s over!” I called.

  “The righteous never—” he began, but a bird cawed, drowning out the rest. I looked up and around for the bird. It was an automatic reflex that ended up with me looking back along the track. Another three of the undead were at the far end. From the way the bushes rustled, I thought there were more behind.

  “Bill! They’re moving!” Lorraine said.

  But Bishop wasn’t running towards the bo
at. He and the juror had edged along the cliff wall with their backs flat against it. Now they were jogging along the uneven stone beach. Lorraine shifted aim. She fired. She missed. She fired again. Another miss.

  “Save the ammo until we’re closer,” I said. “After them. Down the steps. Go!”

  She went first, and I counted to ten before I followed, having counted another eight of the undead appear on the track.

  The steps were steep, slick, and treacherous. Knowing that if the undead attempted to descend them, they’d slip, fall, and hopefully die was no consolation for the fact that same fate awaited us. It took an age to reach the bottom. By the time we did, waves were crashing over the boat’s gunnels. Bishop and his juror had reached the far side of the beach and were clambering up a narrow track that ended in a pair of multi-coloured bins. Bins meant a car park. A car park meant a road, and that meant far easier going for them as well as us.

  Lorraine fired. The shot missed, but it got the juror’s attention. He swung around, pointing his shotgun at us over an impossible distance. Bishop pushed the barrel down, and then pulled the man on, towards their escape.

  The beach was damp, the pebbles and rocks as hard to walk over as the stairs had been to climb down. When I next looked up, Bishop and the juror were gone. When I was halfway across, I heard a rolling thump as the first of the undead reached the stairs, lost its footing, and tumbled down to the rocky beach. That was scant comfort.

  Lorraine made easier going of the beach than I, and reached the far end long before me. She didn’t stop, but ran up the other side, and disappeared between the bins.

  Half a minute later, I reached them and found myself in a packed-dirt car park, filled with signs forbidding barbecues, fly-tipping, and overnight parking. There was no sign of Bishop and the juror. Lorraine stood in the road just beyond the car park. Her submachine gun was raised, but a forlorn look was on her face.

  “They’ve gone,” she said.

  “They haven’t gone far,” I said, “and they won’t have returned to the caravan site. We go after them. I’m not giving up, not yet.”