by Frank Tayell
Sorcha and Flora took the lead. Bill was six feet behind, and Chester just behind him, making sure the other man didn’t collapse into the snow. The trail left by Cavalie’s people was easy to follow. Two sets of occasionally overlapping indentations stretched inland, veering between the hulks of abandoned service vehicles dotting the empty vehicle park, before disappearing behind a low warehouse. He glanced behind. The trail they were leaving was just as noticeable as the one they were following, though the marks left by Bill’s dragging limp might be mistaken for one of the undead. Maybe that would help them. Maybe. Probably not.
Locke jogged ten paces ahead, paused, then waved them on. Flora overtook her, stopping another ten paces ahead. Bill tried to pick up his pace, but there was no way he would catch up.
“No rush, mate,” Chester said. “We know from which direction danger will come, and it won’t come for a while yet.”
Bill grunted in agreement, then forced himself straighter, forced his hands tighter on the AK-74, and forced his feet to continue their slow trudge through the snow.
Flora and Locke had stopped at the corner of a small warehouse. The doors were wide open. A vehicle was stopped halfway outside. Locke ran to the cab. Chester raised the rifle, but Locke dropped down a moment later, and returned to where Flora waited at the warehouse’s corner. After another ten paces, the vehicle came into clearer focus. It wasn’t a warehouse, but a garage, and that vehicle was a fire engine. He guessed that Locke had been checking whether it worked. Clearly, it didn’t.
They were eight paces away when Flora jogged along the edge of the garage. The footsteps left by Cavalie’s goons detoured around the garage’s far side.
“We’re leaving too obvious a trail,” Locke said. “We need a different route.”
“Understood,” Chester said.
“Just keep going,” Bill said.
And they did. Navigating between abandoned and upturned containers, around derelict rigs, but always through the snow. Chester was increasingly certain that Locke had changed the plan, that they were now simply seeking a way out of the harbour. Then he heard it. The sound had been there all along, but lost beneath his crunching footsteps and laboured breathing. Engines. Heavy-duty. Very heavy-duty. The plan hadn’t changed. Locke and Flora had heard the low rumble, and that was the direction in which they were heading. Until a giant fence blocked their way. The triple-thick security barrier was impenetrable to anything but the most industrial of tools.
Locke waved a hand at a cluster of tall buildings. “That’s where they are,” she whispered. “Terminal building, I think. For the passenger ferry.”
“Hsst!” Flora hissed, twenty yards to the south. She pointed at a narrow building, almost like a walled-in corridor, that ran through the fence.
The gates had been forced long ago, but the bodies had never been removed from inside. Pecked-clean skulls mingled with gnawed rib cages, dotted with the occasional brighter swatch of plastic.
“Clearly Rhoskovski didn’t use this entrance,” Chester said, as they picked their way through the bones littering the walled-in corridor. Out of the wind, his skin began to tingle as blood slowly returned. “Do we have a plan?”
“They’re in the passenger-terminal building,” Flora said. “We find a way inside, and we’ll be safe from the snipers.”
“Snipers? I forgot about them,” Chester said. “How are you doing, Bill?”
“Ready to end this,” he said.
“Quiet now,” Locke said. She’d reached the gated door at the corridor’s far end. Lowering her voice, she continued, “It’s a hundred yards through the open. I say we walk slow, like we belong here. Don’t run. Don’t attract attention. If you hear a—”
She was interrupted by a gunshot. Chester looked left and right, raising his rifle, uncertain where the danger lay.
“They’re not shooting at us,” Flora said. “It’s the other side of the building.”
“More prisoners?” Locke asked.
“I don’t think so,” Flora said.
“Zombies,” Bill said. “The fence kept them out of the harbour. Engines must be summoning them.”
“Then we still have the advantage,” Locke said.
Chester didn’t see it quite like that, but followed the other three outside, across another expansive car park, this one dotted with occasional barriers dividing it into a maze of lanes. At first, they took a circuitous route around them. When a second shot rang out, and then a third, they clambered over the barriers, aiming in a direct line towards the building.
“Not long now, mate,” Chester said, hauling Bill over the last of the low barriers. “We’ll be in a warm cab, driving to Belgium. Maybe we’ll stop at a Trappist monastery, get ourselves a beer or two.”
“Shh!” Locke hissed, waving him to silence as she raised her rifle at the rooftop above them, but then lowered it, and waved them on, running herself, not stopping until she reached the building’s plain wall. It was windowless on the ground floor, with only a single security door breaking the unadorned facade. That door was ten feet behind them, and Flora was already jogging the other way, inland, to the building’s furthest edge. Locke was halfway after her when Flora reached the corner. The sailor took one look, and whatever she saw made her turn around, motioning for them to head back. Chester did, running to the security door a little way behind them. There was no handle on the outside. Using the tyre-iron as a lever, he pushed, then pulled the door open. Beyond, someone had blocked a narrow corridor with a wheeled metal cage filled with shelves, phones, and other office furniture. He pushed. The wheels squeaked, but the cage moved far enough he could get inside.
He swung the rifle left and right, up and down, but there was no threat. It was a corridor leading to two pairs of single-person metal detectors. Beyond those was a desk with two doors behind, and beyond those was a row of sliding glass doors.
“No people. No mud on the floor,” he said. “Come on, Bill, get inside.”
A moment later, Locke, and then Flora, joined them.
“There’s another fence at the front of the building,” Flora said. “Zombies. Dozens of them. They’re on our side of the fence.”
“Then the undead are between us and the town,” Locke said. “I thought we might find a way into the suburbs, lose ourselves there.”
“Vehicles?” Bill asked.
“Couldn’t see them,” Flora said. “But we can hear them.”
“Can you?” Bill said.
“Can’t you?” Locke frowned.
“You don’t think we can drive out of here, then?” Chester asked.
“No,” Locke said. “There is a sniper on the high ground. Zombies are in front of us. Behind us is a fence too high to climb, and through which we know of only two access points, here and further south. I think we can assume there is a third, the one used by Rhoskovski’s people.”
“I can tell where you’re going with that,” Chester said. He eased through the metal detectors, and crossed to the glass doors. “Immobile.” He tried forcing them apart with the tyre-iron, but they wouldn’t move. “We’re not getting through here. How long do we have before the bomb should detonate?”
“No time at all,” Locke said. “They should have realised. If not, they will soon.”
“Can’t get through the zombies, and we can’t get through those doors,” Chester said. “What about these two?” He walked behind the reception desk. “A room with no windows, one table, three chairs. An interview room, I’d guess. And this one… A staircase. It leads up.”
“Up, then,” Flora said. “It’s that or go back.”
Chester shrugged. The plan, such as it had been, was in ruins. All they were doing now was finding a way to stay alive for one more second, and one more second after that. They were out of options, but at least they were inside.
The stairwell was windowless. Locke, in the lead, turned on the torch she’d taken from the pump-room. The stairs were steep. At a landing, they found a door. It was
locked, so they continued going up, to another landing with another locked door, then another. Another. Another, until the staircase ended. Locke switched off the torch. Daylight seeped around the hinges of the door in front of them.
“Roof,” she whispered.
“Sniper,” Bill mumbled.
“The SA80,” Flora said. “Please.”
Locke hesitated, then handed her the gun, taking the AK-74M from the sailor. “Don’t miss. Chester?”
Chester placed the tyre-iron between the door and the frame. He heaved, but the door swung open easily, almost silently, flooding the stairwell with light. Flora stepped out into daylight. Squinting, blinking, Chester followed, but was pushed aside by Locke. She raised the Kalashnikov. Chester followed the line of the barrel, beyond Flora, beyond the air vents and extractor fans, to the edge of the roof. Even dressed in white, the sniper was easily spotted. She stood with her back to them, her rifle resting on a single-bar barrier planted on the roof’s very edge. The gun was aimed below. She fired. The shot was loud, echoing across the rooftops.
Flora whistled. The sniper paused. She turned around. She saw the sailor, and the three figures behind. Flora held her fire, waiting until the sniper had begun to drag her rifle around, trying to bring it to bear. Then Flora fired. The sniper crumpled to the snow.
“Check for others,” Locke hissed.
“She said two snipers,” Bill said. Chester swung around, left and right, then behind, peering at the other nearby rooftops, and the more distant chimneys of the houses in the town itself. He couldn’t see anyone, but didn’t trust his eyesight enough to take that to mean they were safe.
When he looked back at the corpse, he saw Locke had reached the woman, had pulled off her hat, and was dragging the white coat free. Locke donned the hat, then the coat, grabbed the sniper’s dropped rifle, and moved to the building’s edge. She fired a shot downward before taking a step back, keeping the blood-red stain on the coat’s back out of view of anyone below.
“Wait here, Bill,” Chester said. “Lean against the door, there. Right, back in a bit. If you hear anyone on the stairs, fire.”
“Yep,” Bill mumbled.
Chester jogged across the roof, over to Locke and Flora. Locke was pulling off the hat and coat. She handed them to Flora.
“Keep your back to us,” Locke said. “The stain.”
“Got it,” Flora said. She pulled the coat on, climbed up onto the building’s edge, fired a shot down, then stepped back.
“You’re too large,” Locke said to Chester. “They’d notice if you tried that. They’ll notice it’s not her soon enough.”
“What did you see?” Chester asked.
“Vehicles,” Locke said. “And people. And zombies. About a hundred of the undead gathered at a fence. Give it an hour, and it’ll break. From the engine noise, they aren’t going to wait that long. They’re waiting for the return of their two demolitionists.”
“Any chance we can steal a vehicle?” Chester asked.
Locke’s expression was almost bemused. “Can you really not hear that? Sorry. It’s tanks, Chester. Five AMX Leclerc main battle tanks.”
“Oh.”
“There are three ploughs as well,” Locke said. “All half tracks. Ideal for us, yes, but there’s two trucks outside, and another half-inside the building. Who knows how many more vehicles there are inside that we can’t see? Who knows how many people there are?”
“More than fifty,” Flora said. “Has to be.”
She walked over to the edge, fired another shot at the undead, then stepped back. “I can count twenty people down there. And I can see dirt bikes. At least ten. They’re on the zombie-side of the fence.”
“Cavalie must have come here straight after we escaped from her,” Locke said. “The zombies followed the sound of her bikes.”
“Are you sure we can’t steal a plough?” Chester asked.
“Not without a fight,” Locke said. “And there are far too many for us to survive.”
“We can’t stay up here,” Chester said.
“I’m calling that the first instalment of my revenge,” Flora said, looking at the dead sniper. “But there’s another sniper, and there’s Rhoskovski, so it’s only one third of my revenge. You three go. I’ll give you two minutes to get outside before I start shooting.”
“Captain Fielding,” Locke said. “Your crew is wandering Europe in search of a refuge that doesn’t exist. You have a responsibility to live, to rescue them. You won’t do that by throwing your life away here.”
“Do you have a better plan?” Flora asked.
“I don’t know if it’s better, but it should lead to more of them dying. Mr Carson, when I say, throw that corpse over the wall. Captain, the grenades. Drop them one at a time, over the edge. I’ll set the timer on the plastic explosive for a minute. If we had time, I’d see about rigging a parachute, but we shall simply have to hope the fall doesn’t dislodge the detonator. Mr Carson, once you have thrown the body, get Mr Wright down the stairs.”
“And then?” Chester asked.
“We head back through the fence, and through the harbour. We’ll know they are behind us, and, hopefully, that the zombies are behind them. No more questions, since I don’t have any other answers.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Chester said. He bent and picked up the corpse. “You two ready? It’s not a parachute you need, though. Remind me to tell you the story of Hull and balloons sometime.”
“If we have time,” Locke said. “Captain?”
“Go,” Flora said.
Chester heaved the body over the wall. Not waiting to hear it land, he ran back to Bill.
“Change of plans, mate,” he said. “They’ve got tanks, so we’re running.”
“Down?” Bill said.
The first of the grenades detonated. A dull thump that rattled the windows below.
“Down,” Chester said. Rifle held one-handed, the other arm around Bill’s waist, they half-fell, half-ran down the stairs.
The second grenade detonated when they reached the landing below. The third, distantly muffled, exploded as they reached the landing below that.
“Now we wait for the big one,” Chester said. “We’re going back through the harbour. Lose ourselves in the city, I guess. There’s zombies out there. We’ll try to get them between us and Cavalie. We think she’s here.”
“Enemy of my enemy,” Bill said.
“Yeah, here’s hoping that holds true with the undead,” Chester said. He could hear footsteps above them, but he didn’t think there were any below.
They reached the ground floor vestibule two steps ahead of Flora, and five ahead of Locke.
“How long do we—” Chester began. The building shook. Dust rained down. A framed photograph of some forgotten politician fell from the wall. Two, smaller, explosions detonated immediately after, in quick succession.
“It worked,” Locke said. “And it must have detonated some of their fuel. Go, don’t stop.”
Chester pushed Bill through the metal detectors.
“Behind!” Flora called.
Chester turned around. On the other side of the glass doors were two people, armed with shotguns. Locke fired first. A bullet ricocheted past Chester’s ear. The shotgun’s blasts were muffled.
“Hold your fire!” Locke said. “It’s bulletproof glass. Go!”
Another shotgun blast sounded, muffled by the transparent barrier, but Chester didn’t look behind. He followed Bill out into the daylight, and saw the figures approaching them. Over a dozen, but they were all unarmed, lurching, staggering, limping.
“Zombies. Never thought I’d be glad to see them. Go on, Bill. We’re almost safe.”
Except they weren’t. Not yet.
Chester had to push and carry Bill over the maze of barriers, and to the walled-in corridor that led through the fence. The corpse-strewn tunnel slowed them all to Bill’s limping pace. On the other side, in the harbour, the dense snow slowed them further. All we
re breathing hard before they reached the garage housing the solitary fire engine.
“How are you feeling, Bill?” Chester asked.
“Warming up,” he said, though he didn’t look it. “They had tanks?”
“At least five, and three military halftracks with ploughs,” Locke said. “Some trucks, too. A few abandoned dirt bikes, so Cavalie might be here.”
“Did we blow up the tanks?” Chester asked.
“No,” Flora said. “We might have dislodged the treads of one, perhaps two, but no more than that.”
“Oh, I think we did a bit more than that,” Locke said, turning around. “Yes. Smoke. I think we started a fire. Must have blown up some of their fuel. That fire might take care of the other vehicles.”
“So we’re on foot, they’re on foot,” Bill said. “And in a city covered by snow.”
“Ah, yes,” Locke said. “I take your point.”
“I got one of the snipers,” Flora said. “One of the women in white. That’s revenge for Magda. But I wonder who they were.”
“Channel Tunnel,” Bill said.
“Sorry?” Locke asked.
“Go to the Channel Tunnel,” Bill said.
“It’s been mined,” Flora said.
“Exactly,” Bill said. “More of them, less of us. Odds are on our side.”
“It’s as good a plan as I can think of,” Chester said.
But their luck had finally broken.
The deep snow slowed them to a high-stepping wade. The cold slowed them further. By the time the destroyer came into sight, they were moving at a slow walk. Behind them, the plume of smoke grew thicker, and rose higher, a signal to everyone in Calais that something untoward had happened. A signal seen by the group on the far side of the harbour.
