by Frank Tayell
“It’ll give the admiral time to go to America,” Chester said.
“Yes, and perhaps she will find it a land of milk and honey,” Locke said. “Or she will discover it’s no different to Europe. By spring, we’ll know. Perhaps we’ll know what happened to Denmark.”
“You’re thinking of your friends in… where was it? Haderslev?”
“Yes. Denmark, Sweden, Norway; there are more logical places for humanity’s new capital, but perhaps that is why we need somewhere like Faroe for now. We will have a few months to gather more data. And time to recover. Rescuing that convoy will be no simple task.”
“Nope. Bill’s on his way back. I guess we better get started.” He kicked mud over the ashes of the small fire.
“What’s your assessment?” Locke called to Bill.
“Cars absolutely everywhere,” Bill said. “We’re at the tail of the world’s worst traffic jam. I could see for about four miles, and it was four miles of cars and trucks. On the road, and in the fields. There’s a junction ahead. A much wider road runs at ninety degrees to this one. I guess that’s where they were trying to reach. Probably heard something on the radio, or maybe they were just following each other. Either way, we’ve got to head back the way we came.”
“Any zombies?” Chester asked.
“A few, trapped between vehicles,” Bill said. “None that are an immediate threat.”
Locke climbed into the driver’s seat, and flipped through the maps. Bill took the navigator seat, and Chester slid into his position at the rear.
“Here,” Locke said, passing the maps to Bill. “They’re not much use until we know precisely where we are.”
“Any guesses as to where that might be?” Bill asked, picking through them. “I couldn’t see any signposts.”
“North of Amiens, south of Lille, and to the east of both,” Locke said. “We should aim due west. We’ve enough fuel to reach the sea. Probably to reach Dunkirk, again depending on where we are, but I think we’ll be sailing to Ireland.”
“A plane, a tank, and a sailing boat,” Chester said. “It’s turning into a real tour.”
“The last grand tour,” Locke said as she started the engine. “Certainly one for the history books, just as soon as you write them, Bill.” There was a jolt as the ATV drove over the curb and into the field as Locke turned them back the way they’d come. “Sorry,” she added. “It has better steering than I expected. Maybe not the last grand tour. There, we’re back on the road. Yes, perhaps we should consider an expedition to the Middle East for fuel, though first we should head to the factory where these ATVs were made. With a few hundred, we could mount a survey of the world.”
“Once the zombies are dead,” Bill said, leaning forward to peer through the windscreen. “There are fewer of them, right?” he added, uncertainty creeping into his voice. “Ah, how can we tell?”
“As you said, how do you prove a null?” Locke said.
“Should one of us go up to the turret and keep an eye out for Cavalie?” Chester asked. “And when I say one of us, even with these glasses, I’m volunteering Bill for the job.”
“I would say no,” Locke said. “We should operate under the assumption that she will look for us. However, we won’t hear the sounds of their bikes over our engine, so a lookout would only present them with a target. Our route is set. Let us assume we are driving into a trap. If we’re not, it would be a pleasant surprise.”
“Ah, for the days before, when I only had to worry about mortgage payments and cancelled contracts,” Bill muttered. “The compass says we’re heading due south.”
“I know,” Locke said.
“There’s a road up to the right,” Bill said.
“I’ve seen it,” Locke said. “Perhaps you could concentrate on road signs?”
“Can’t see any,” Bill said. “But I can see the undead. Quite a few in that field, heading towards us.”
Locke accelerated into the turning, and didn’t slow.
Chester closed his eyes, but only for a second.
“Sign!” Locke said.
“Cambrai. Five kilometres, west,” Bill said. “Cambrai? I’ve never heard of it.” He opened the map. Starting with Amiens, he ran his finger in an increasingly wide spiral circle. “Ah, found it. Draw a line from Amiens to Lille, and we’re about halfway between, but fifty kilometres to the east. About another hundred kilometres to Dunkirk. Give or take.”
“Do you have a route?”
“Head towards Cambrai. In two kilometres, look for a road heading north. We’ll avoid the town, then cut westward, aiming to travel south of Lille, and pick up the railway line running between it and Calais. Follow that until we’re closer to the coast and switch back to the roads for the last leg to Dunkirk.”
Locke relaxed into the driver’s seat.
“Zombie,” Bill said.
“Seen it,” Locke said. “Can’t avoid it.”
There was a bump, a jolt as the ghoul was dragged under the treads, but it was too common an event now to warrant any further comment.
“Hedge’s broken ahead,” Bill said. “Looks like the field’s washed onto the road.”
Locke slowed. “Would you prefer to drive, Bill?”
“No, sorry.”
“Sorcha?” Chester asked as they reached the other side of the muddy quagmire. “I’ve a question. You say that you were preparing for a nuclear war, right? All the things you did, all Lisa Kempton did, it was in case a nuclear war happened?”
“That’s correct.”
“What were you going to do next? After the fallout settled, I mean?”
“A lot depended on how the world ended, and how quickly,” she said. “Would the cabal launch a first strike? Would Russia or China launch a pre-emptive attack? Would Quigley defy all expectations, employ some of the cunning which spun his way to the top, and act through proxies, starting the war in North Africa or East Asia? Though the time frame in which we had to act might be elongated, the outcome would have been the same. A warning would have been sent to all of those we’d decided to save. Not all of our people were on that list. We knew we were leaving friends and family behind, but sacrifices had to be made. The selected few would have gone to an extraction point. From there they would have flown, driven, or, in a few cases, taken a boat, to a remote location. Elysium, for instance, or Haderslev, or our redoubt in the Portuguese mountains. There they would wait for the fallout to clear, the radiation level to drop. It would then be their responsibility to communicate with The New World. Tamika would pilot it to them, and ferry them aboard.”
“And then?” Chester asked.
“That is as far as we were able to plan,” Locke said. “Without knowing which places would be worst affected, we couldn’t decide on our ultimate destination.”
“Right, but you did have plans?”
“Broadly, yes. That is the purpose of the warehouses. We would have taken our people to an area least affected by fallout and furthest from… furthest from… well, from the likes of Quigley and any other politicians and generals, lurking in their bunkers. We would have created a self-sustaining community. And then we would have attacked.”
“What do you mean, attacked?” Bill asked.
“Just what I say,” she said. “Saving humanity isn’t simply about providing food and water. It is about ensuring there is a future for them. That is true leadership. The leadership Quigley should have provided, and the reason why provision had to be made to ensure his ilk weren’t the only survivors. When they emerged from their bunkers, they would have enslaved the handful of unfortunates who’d survived the atomic nightmare. It wouldn’t have been called enslavement, of course. Salaries would have been paid in MREs and medical check-ups, but only because a sick serf is less productive. We would have destroyed those traitorous dictators, or died in the attempt. And after that…” She tapped her fingers against the wheel. “We were not so naive as to think paradise would have emerged, but it would, at least, have been a level
playing field. The leaders chosen, the decisions they took, the mistakes they made, would have been products of that horrific new world, not the diseased dreams of those who destroyed the old.”
“How long was Lisa Kempton planning this?” Chester asked.
“All her life,” Locke said. “All her life. You see—”
“Slow down,” Bill cut in. “Slow down. Stop.”
“What?” Locke asked, braking.
“I thought I saw something. I’m… I’m not sure what. We’re down in a dip now. Just keep going, but… but be cautious.”
“Zombies?”
“No. Perhaps,” Bill said.
Locke drove them down into a waterlogged dip where a shallow stream had carved a new path through the road. She gunned the engine, continuing up the other side, and to the top of the incline. She didn’t need any further instructions to halt the ATV.
“There is a horde,” Bill whispered.
“It’s there?” Chester asked, leaning forward, trying to peer out of the windscreen.
“No,” Bill said. “But it was.” He opened the door and stepped outside.
Before them stretched a muddy plain absent of roads, trees, buildings, or grass. The desolate expanse was only broken by occasional rainwater ponds and the more frequent partially buried limb.
“It can’t have looked much different a century ago,” Locke said. “It’s missing barbed wire, but this was No Man’s Land during the Great War.”
“How wide is it?” Chester asked, squinting as he tilted the plastic-frame glasses.
“Hard to say,” Bill said. “We’ve arrived at an oblique angle.”
“Bigger than Birmingham, right?” Chester asked.
“Bigger than Birmingham,” Bill said. “Definitely bigger than the horde that trapped us in the tunnel in Wales.”
“It stretches beyond the horizon,” Locke whispered. “I can’t see a single tree ahead of us.”
“So, millions, yes?” Chester said. “Forty or fifty million?”
“More,” Locke said. “Rivers and towns will be gone. Entire cities, vanished.”
“The pilot was telling the truth,” Bill said. He turned his gaze from the bleak horizon to the ill-defined edge of the barren desert. The road they were on continued for another quarter mile, descending a shallow incline, disappearing beneath the mud just at the point it met a junction. The route the road followed was still discernible, a darker smear between two brown-green swamps, before finally being masked by the trail left by millions of feet a mile distant.
“Do we discount Scandinavia?” Locke said. “Do we discount Russia?”
“For what?” Chester said.
“The horde which descended on Birmingham was approximately ten million strong,” she said. “If the population of Britain before the outbreak was sixty-five million, to which we must add tourists and the handful of refugees allowed sanctuary, then it amounts to one seventh of the population. Do we discount children and the old, those unable to walk even after infection? I don’t know. But Europe’s continental population was ten times that of Britain. Does that make this horde ten times the size?”
“One hundred million? Nah,” Chester said. “Zombies can’t have crossed the Pyrenees, else the people in Creil would know about it. Same with the Alps.”
“Perhaps not the Pyrenees,” Locke said. “But if they can destroy a place like Birmingham, can we really rely on mountains to protect us from… from this? What obstacle would a hill make if a city can be trampled to dust? Both are built from mud and stone. The reason I ask, the real question we need to answer, is whether we can discount Russia and thus the steppe. Mongolia. China. Think why the word horde is such a perfect fit for this nightmare.”
“Genghis Khan,” Bill murmured. “You think it might be more than a hundred million? Billions, even?”
“I don’t know,” Locke said.
“It was heading east, judging by the way those trees just ahead of us fell,” Bill said. “East-southeast. Creil will be safe. The horde will hit the Alps, not the Pyrenees.”
“That’s something,” Locke said. “But it is the smallest comfort. We assume that there is only one horde, travelling in one direction. What was it the pilot said, that their convoy was attempting to lure the undead to Calais? Twenty thousand people? To such a vast horror, those small numbers would barely be noticeable.”
“Nope, you’re right,” Chester said. “There’s no comfort in that.”
Disconsolate, they returned to the ATV.
Chapter 21 - The Beach, Red With Rust
Dunkirk
“That’s the sea,” Locke said.
“Are you sure?” Bill asked.
“Either that or the sky is upside down,” Locke said, pointing at the small triangle of dark blue, visible for a moment, then lost to the curve of the road.
“Sorry. Exhaustion,” Bill said. “I meant that it should be another half hour before we reach the Channel.”
“We’ve made better time on the roads than we did on the railway,” Locke said.
“You’re right about this ATV,” Chester said. “We’re travelling nearly as fast as in the old world. It’s only the undead that’s slowing us down.”
“But there weren’t too many of them,” Locke said. “They must have been sucked into the path of the horde.”
“No, that won’t explain it,” Bill said, turning his attention completely to the corner of the map in which he’d scrawled his calculations. “We went from Cambrai to Waziers, then to Carvin to avoid Lens and Lille. We should have skirted the north of Merville to approach Dunkirk from the south. Unless that sign for Ypres had been turned around.”
“We didn’t cross the border,” Locke said. “If we had, we’d be further from the coast, not nearer.”
“I don’t suppose it matters,” Bill said. A flash of deep blue was visible for a moment, then gone. “And that’s certainly the sea ahead of us.”
“And slightly nearer, is…” Locke began, trailing off as she slowed the ATV. “That’s a crater.”
“Nuclear?” Chester asked, peering forward. “No, it’s too small.”
“It’s destroyed the road, and a corner of that field,” Locke said. “They did tell us that the port of Dunkirk had been destroyed. I suppose that includes the approach roads as well.”
“We’ll have to turn back,” Bill said.
“No,” Locke said, turning into a field. “We’re too close to bother with that. Dunkirk is as far as we need this vehicle to carry us.” And without waiting for anyone else’s opinion, she drove the ATV across the bare field.
“You’re going too fast,” Bill said.
“Any slower, we might stall,” Locke said, a manic edge creeping into her voice. “Stop and we sink into the mud. Sink too far and we’ll never get moving again.”
The ATV smashed through a hedge, across a ditch, and onto the firmer ground of a narrow track where withered weeds bloomed from every crack in the ancient asphalt.
“Now you can slow,” Bill said.
Reluctantly, Locke slowed the ATV, but only until the track joined a road just before a bullet-riddled sign.
“What did that sign say?” Locke asked, swerving around a wheel-less Citroen.
“Petit-Fort-Philippe, one kilometre,” Bill said. “It’s to the south of Dunkirk’s port.”
“And the beaches to the south of the port are where the boats are,” Chester said.
“We’re almost there,” Locke said, an edge of excitement in her voice.
“Zombie,” Bill said.
“Seen it,” Locke said. She didn’t slow, but ploughed into the creature, tearing it in two. Arm, shoulder, neck and head slammed into the windscreen, smearing the glass with tar-like gore.
Chester winced, and closed his eyes. “Almost there. Almost over. And I am thoroughly looking forward to a year on a freezing island if I don’t have to return to the mainland until after the undead are gone.”
“Road ahead’s blocked,” Bil
l said. It was only partly true. The northern edge of the road disappeared in a wide crater. Filled with water, it had leached mud from the field. The other half of the road was filled with three-quarters of a milk tanker. The rear of the tanker was utterly missing, though the paintwork, depicting a bucolic pair of cows, was perfectly intact.
Locke slowed, then sped up. “Side road. There, beyond the truck. Hold on.”
After fifty curving metres, a hedge blocked the road. It had been growing at the side of a field, behind a wire fence. A spring storm had washed the field’s topsoil onto the road, bringing the hedge with it, roots and all, and there it had flourished, growing and spreading wild.
“Another field,” Locke said. “One last field and we’re there.”
The ATV jostled and rocked, and Chester gave up trying to peer through the windscreen. Without warning, there was a tearing crash. Soil, leaves, and branches rained across the front of the vehicle.
“Road,” Locke said. “And one that runs east-west, I think.”
“The sea’s in the west,” Bill said.
“A wide road, yet not well maintained,” Locke said. “You see the aggregate exposed around the edge of that pothole? It’s a cheap surface you’d have to repair once every three years.”
“You know about roads, too?” Bill asked.
“Saving the world wasn’t simply about stopping disasters, I told you that. Building roads, linking up communities, enabling commerce, enabling construction, enabling change, that was a key strategy. Improve lives, change them, empower them, create new ideas, new opportunities, new leadership.”
“Campsite ahead. Looks like a fire swept through it,” Bill said. “You don’t mean you built roads here in France?”
“We built them anywhere that didn’t have them,” Locke said. “Who could say where the next danger would originate? Except it came from… from…” Her voice trailed off as she slowly applied the brakes.
Chester leaned forward. He could tell there was sea out there, but not much more besides. “What is it? Zombies?”
