Surviving The Evacuation | Life Goes On (Book 2): No More News

by Tayell, Frank

  “Only one,” Pete whispered, and the wind seemed to catch his words, echoing them in a rising whisper.

  “Pete, the house,” Olivia whispered. “The balcony.”

  He turned to look. There was someone there. Not on the balcony itself, but standing behind the French doors. He wasn’t undead, not unless zombies had upped their table manners. With a bowl in one hand, a fork in the other, he was methodically eating while watching the new arrivals watching him.

  “He must think we’re soldiers,” Pete said.

  “We should go say hello,” Olivia said. “Ask him what happened. “Ask him…” She paused, stopped, and looked around. She’d walked as far as the edge of the road and the beginning of the poorly paved drive leading up to the house.

  Pete stopped next to her, turning around himself. “What is it?”

  All he could hear was the sound of the wind through the trees, except… Except the trees were mostly leafless, and around the house, they’d been trimmed. The sound was far closer. Far lower. Far wetter. He looked down, jumping back, just as Olivia fired.

  At the side of the road, separating it from the large house, was a drainage ditch. Partially overgrown further along the road, it had been cleared near the driveway where a narrow-gapped metal grid had been laid over it. From beneath came a wet, soft, squelching whisper as the zombie crawled through the deep mud. Olivia’s rifle cracked loudly. The bullet softly slapped into the boggy morass near the creature’s head, but not near enough. The zombie crawled on, somehow finally managing to get a knee beneath its body. Dripping wet mud, seeping black pus from dozens of slashing knife wounds, it stood. Its shoulder slammed into the edge of the metal grating, leaving a sodden patch of cloth and skin behind.

  Olivia fired again and this time, from less than three metres distance, she hit. The sound of the corpse splashing into the swampy murk was lost beneath another gunshot. Pete spun towards the TAPV, but it wasn’t Corrie or Lacoona who’d fired. It was the man in the house. He’d opened the balcony doors, and with what looked like a hunting rifle, he’d fired towards the field on the other side of the road.

  “The car!” Olivia said. “Quick. The roof. Rufus, heel!”

  Still unclear why, Pete ran back over to it, following her lead. Bracing a foot on the wheel arch, he clambered up onto the car, and then its roof. And then he saw them. Zombies. In uniform. Crawling across the cleared ground.

  “Rufus!” Olivia called. The dog was still circling the car. “Rufus, please!” Finally, the dog bounded up onto the roof. Pete kneeled, grabbing the dog’s collar.

  “There’s got to be at least ten. Why?” Olivia asked. She raised the rifle, and lowered it again. “How?”

  A shot came, this time from the TAPV as Corrie fired from the vehicle’s turret. Another shot came, this time from the house.

  Pete half raised the pistol, while Olivia crouched, tracking her rifle left and right, but neither fired. As soon as a zombie reached the road, Corrie, or the man in the house, and sometimes both, shot the creature. All the undead wore uniform. They’d all had their legs crushed.

  “I think that’s it,” Olivia finally said.

  “Clear!” Corrie called.

  “He could have warned us,” Pete said, letting go of Rufus’s collar. The dog gave a frustrated shake. “That guy in the house, he could have given us a heads-up.”

  Even as he turned back to the house, a scream ululated from the balcony, ending as abruptly as it had begun. There was no sign of the man.

  “Quick!” Olivia said, a step before Pete. Both jumped down, sprinting for the house, and its front door. Rufus quickly overtook them.

  There was no way it would open without a sledgehammer. Cement had oozed around the hinges, and set hard. It was the same at the ground-floor window. But through a scratched inch of glass, he could see stacked furniture dripping with cement.

  “Back door!” Pete yelled, sprinting onto the bare-earth yard. At least they knew why the man hadn’t dealt with the zombie beneath the car. With the vehicle in the way, he’d not had a shot from his window. Cemented into his house, he’d been unable to leave.

  “Careful, Pete!” Olivia yelled, a step behind.

  The back door had a cat flap. Once. Not anymore. The plastic frame had been ripped free, leaving fresh splinters and a hole large enough for a figure to crawl through. Assuming, of course, the figure didn’t mind ripping its skin on the fractured wood, dislocating a bone or two as it contorted its way inside. And of course, a zombie wouldn’t even notice such painful discomfort.

  “I don’t think I’d fit,” Olivia said. “You certainly wouldn’t.” Rufus took a cautious sniff, then backed away. “And he doesn’t want to.”

  From the road came a mechanical growl. By the time they’d dashed back to the front of the house, they saw Corrie drive the TAPV off the road, into the yard, and right up to the edge of the house, swerving at the last minute to bring it broadside-on to the house, and only a metre from the wall. Lacoona was already in the turret. She clambered the rest of the way up and out, and jumped, grabbing onto the edge of the balcony, hauling herself up, getting a knee onto the balcony rail before pausing.

  “What is it?” Olivia called.

  For the longest second, Lacoona didn’t move. She knelt, staring into the room beyond. “Dead,” she called, and lowered herself back down, swinging by her hands until, with a nimble leap, and a half-turn in mid-air, she landed on the TAPV’s roof. “Go,” she called. “They’re dead.”

  The muscular tyres churned deep furrows in the mud as Corrie reversed back onto the road. With as much attention on the house, at least until they reached the deep drainage ditch, Pete and Olivia followed.

  “What did you see?” Pete asked.

  “Zombies,” Lacoona said. “At least five. He’s dead. The man in the window.”

  “Should we…” Olivia turned back to the house. “We should see if there’s anyone else in there.”

  “They would’ve have called out,” Lacoona said. “Or screamed.”

  “They might not have,” Olivia said.

  Lacoona shook her head. “We just don’t have time. Nipigong is only fifteen kilometres away. If it’s fallen, all the cattle are in danger. Have you seen what zombies do to livestock? They rip them apart.”

  “She’s right,” Corrie said. “We’ve got to raise the alarm.”

  Nipigong wasn’t a city, but a fortified town, lit up brighter than Christmas with searchlights and spot-lamps, and with a pair of tanks parked on either side of the approach road.

  They had to explain the situation three times. First to a sergeant aboard a tank, then to a captain who’d been dragged from a post-office command post, and then to a civilian who seemed to outrank everyone. But within ten minutes, the sergeant, his tank, and two of the trucks crammed with soldiers were speeding south. Pete and the others weren’t sent with them, but told to park the TAPV where the tank had been positioned, and wait for further instructions.

  “Zombies don’t run,” Corrie said.

  “Yeah, I hope not,” Lacoona said.

  “I mean we’ve got some time before danger comes, so why don’t we see if we can find some food. Olivia, Pete, can you watch the road?”

  “Sure, but can you see if you can find some cereal?” Pete said.

  “You’re still addicted to that?” Olivia asked as Corrie and Lacoona made their way inside the barricade.

  “It was the sight of all those cows,” Pete said. “Made me think of milk, and that made me think of cereal. Something with marshmallows and chocolate.”

  “Milkshake,” she said. “That’s what I’d go for. But I’d keep the marshmallows and chocolate. And I’d settle for just the chocolate.” She sighed. “You know the sad part?”

  “That it’s going to be years before we see those in the stores?” Pete asked.

  “No, that I’ve had worse dates than this,” she said.

  “Dates?” he asked.

  “Don’t you remember? Ea
rlier, after we finished washing dishes in the hotel, you said we should go on a date.”

  “Oh, yeah. That seems… that was only this morning?”

  “It does seem like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “I’m not calling this our date,” Pete said.

  “That’s not how it works,” Olivia said. “Good or bad, it counts. I didn’t make the rules.”

  “I wonder who did. You’ve really been on worse?”

  “You know what they say,” she said. “It’s the company that counts.”

  5th March

  Chapter 27 - Evacuation

  Nipigong to Marathon

  One of the trucks, which had driven west with the tank, returned after an hour, though with only a driver and one soldier aboard. The tank and the other truck had continued back to the dairy herd.

  The fort spent the night on a tensely vertiginous high alert. But though the alarm was frequently raised, it always proved to be false. Before dawn, led by the remaining tank, an eight-vehicle convoy was ready to journey west to help protect the herd, but there was as much concern about what lay to the east as this new danger behind their lines.

  As she’d advanced eastward, General Yoon had repurposed existing telephone wires into a new and dedicated hard-line, but the connection had failed an hour before the TAPV had arrived at the fort. With the timing worryingly coincidental, the decision was made to send another convoy east. Most of the better-repaired vehicles had already gone west. An armoured personnel carrier, a hastily repaired armoured car old enough to be a museum piece, and three fire-service vehicles with so many dents even a scrap yard wouldn’t take them were all that were left. The TAPV brought up the rear, Lacoona driving as the lead APC set a ferocious pace.

  After a few miles of veering left then swerving right, Pete closed his eyes, already feeling road-sick. Though it had been cold during the night, it hadn’t been cold enough for ice. The road was damp, not slick, but littered with debris. It was better, he decided, to think of it as debris rather than bodies, particularly now that so many limbs had been torn from torsos, so much flesh had been crushed, and bones pulverised by the passage of many large vehicles. Tanks, he supposed. The general’s army. On its advance. He’d not given much thought to that until now. They were at war, with which, despite the handful of skirmishes over the last few days, he was only familiar as a couch-bound spectator. Thousands had died on this stretch of road. And it was with the frequent thud and soft bump he finally realised how many more would have to die before peace returned.

  The undead weren’t uniformly littered along the road, but clustered a few miles apart, and always close to where a junkyard of cars and trucks had been shunted to the verge. Ploughing aside broken exhausts and crushed fenders, crunching over broken windscreens as well as the remains of the undead, Pete found himself remembering the outback and the nightmare drive from the plane to Corrie’s cabin. Perhaps this was a form of warfare with which he was familiar.

  The convoy halted at Terrace Bay, an indecently peaceful hamlet, where boats fished on the lake, while washing was being optimistically hung on the line. That a lot of the gear was camouflage, and the lines were being hung in yards already dug over, gave a hint that the new normality had taken hold. But clearly, the resident-soldiers had no recent trouble from the undead.

  Leaving the captain to organise a better defence of the town, and carrying a new dispatch for the general, they continued east, alone except for Lake Superior to the south for company.

  At the outskirts of Marathon, on the eastern edge of Lake Superior, they stopped to refuel the truck and themselves, but they didn’t enter the hamlet that was already crammed to the rafters. Refugees were arriving, more by the hour, sent by the general, and apparently awaiting a ferry to take them to Thunder Bay.

  “Had you heard anything about a ferry?” Corporal Lacoona asked as they drove away, continuing inland.

  “I was going to ask you that,” Corrie said. “You mean you hadn’t?”

  “Clive allocated me to work the quarantine at the airport to keep me out of trouble,” Lacoona said. “Obviously, this was before we knew how bad it could get at the airport. Considering how bad it got at the quarantine centre by the rail yard, maybe he knew what he was doing. But after the first rush of planes, there wasn’t much to do. We had fighter jets coming in, of course, and they were flying survey missions.”

  “Like to South Bend?” Olivia asked.

  “Exactly,” Lacoona said. “So if they were going to send a ferry from Thunder Bay to Marathon, they’d have flown a survey mission first.”

  “Are there ferries in Thunder Bay?” Olivia asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Lacoona said. “But I didn’t hear anyone saying they would be used for a rescue mission.”

  She might not have, but others had. An hour later, and ten kilometres south of White River, they had to pull off the road onto a logging track, to let a convoy pass. Coaches. Buses. Trucks. Cars. All had a recently painted red cross on the side. Some so recent, they’d begun driving before it had time to dry, leaving a drip-drag trail across the chassis, bearing far too close a resemblance to blood to offer reassurance.

  Pete had counted twenty-seven vehicles before a white pickup detached itself, pulling over and off the road to stop in front of their TAPV. A maple-leaf flag flew on the roof, while two dozen empty stretchers were stacked in the truck bed, held in place by a web of nylon washing lines and electrical tape.

  Neither driver nor passenger were in uniform, though both were armed. The driver had a hunting rifle he grabbed the moment the car came to rest, and which he held at the ready as he scanned the trees. The passenger had a holster at her belt, but she left it there as she walked, wearily, around the truck and over to the TAPV.

  “Dr Lutz,” she said. “Have you come from Marathon?”

  “We came through Marathon,” Lacoona said. “But we came from Thunder Bay. Jan Lacoona. Hi.”

  Lutz nodded. “The ferries have arrived, then?”

  “Ah, no,” Lacoona said. “Not an hour ago. We’ve driven overland. Set off yesterday. The first we heard of a ferry was when we drove through Marathon. We’re bringing messages from Thunder Bay to Wawa. Are these more passengers?”

  “The old. The sick. The far-too-young to be anywhere near the frontline,” Lutz said “General Yoon said there’d be a ferry. You’re going to Wawa? You can tell the general. Excuse me.”

  She got back in her truck. The driver did the same, giving a nod before returning to the still passing convoy. All four stood, watching the road until the vehicles were gone, leaving only fumes as a reminder of their presence.

  “No birds,” Pete said. “There should be birds. Weird. What?” he added, realising the three women all wore a pensive frown. “What did I miss?”

  “They think there’s a hospital in Thunder Bay,” Corrie said.

  “Isn’t there one?” Pete asked, turning to the corporal.

  “Sure,” Lacoona said. “But it’s not geared up for a ferry full of patients.”

  “And there’s no ferry,” Olivia added. “But there are zombies near Nipigong.”

  “You mean we should have warned them?” Pete asked.

  “You saw the driver,” Olivia said. “They know to watch for zombies.”

  “I still don’t get the problem,” Pete said.

  “They expect a ferry in Marathon and a hospital in Thunder Bay,” Corrie said. “And if there isn’t, if there’s a problem, they expect someone to call. The satellites are down. The radio waves are clogged, and reception around here wouldn’t be great. With power blackouts, there are no repeater stations, comms would be very limited, and reception somewhere so wooded would be difficult enough normally. The general was repurposing old telephone lines into a new network, and that broke yesterday. But that also tells us the old system doesn’t work. But people instinctively assume instant communication. Sure, consciously they know phones don’t work now. Subconsciously, they don’t. Whic
h, Pete, means that things are bad out here and likely to get a lot worse.”

  “I still don’t…” Pete began.

  “They’re evacuating the people who can’t fight,” Olivia said.

  “Oh.” And then Pete truly understood. “This really is a war, isn’t it?”

  Chapter 28 - The War for Wawa

  Wawa

  When they stopped to empty a fuel can into the TAPV’s tank, they heard a rolling thunder, too regular to be natural. They listened until they were sure they’d all heard it, and certain that it came from ahead.

  Ten kilometres on, buttoned up inside the TAPV, they didn’t hear the helicopter, but Olivia saw it, hovering in the distance ahead of them before it darted ground-ward, disappearing behind the trees.

  “Was it shot down?” Pete asked, peering into the distance.

  “I don’t see any smoke,” Corrie said.

  “Landing,” Lacoona said. “We’ll reach the airport before we reach the town. That’s where it was going, eh?”

  But when they reached the airport, it was in time to see the helicopter departing again. A low chain-link fence ringed the airfield, though with a recently dug ditch between it and the roadside. Nearby, freshly cut and trimmed tree trunks suggested that the construction of a sturdier defence had been recently interrupted. Behind the gated road entrance, two tanks stood on guard. In front of the gate stood one sentry, while another sat. His leg was bandaged, and he had a crutch close to the hand that wasn’t holding his assault rifle.

  “We bring a message for General Yoon from Captain Crawford in Thunder Bay,” Lacoona said.