Surviving The Evacuation (Book 15): Where There's Hope

by Tayell, Frank

  “Entertainment,” Flora said.

  “That doesn’t make sense. It’s not like they can see us. Unless… do you think there are cameras?”

  “That would seem ridiculously sophisticated for this group,” she said. “They wanted us to carry the corpse outside. We might as well do it.”

  She half expected a shot as they hauled the body through the broken window, and almost would have welcomed it as they carried the corpse around the building, back to the front entrance.

  “Ah, congratulations, we have two winners!” Rhoskovski said. He was there with one of his bodyguards. Flora glanced up at the garage’s roof. The other fur-clad bodyguard stood there, rifle raised to her shoulder.

  “Search him,” Rhoskovski said.

  “Search who?” Flora said.

  “The good captain,” Rhoskovski said. “Search his body. Now!”

  She bent down, glanced at Rhoskovski, then emptied the putrescent corpse’s pockets. She found nothing.

  “Look in his boots!” Rhoskovski said.

  The dead captain’s feet had almost liquefied. But whatever Rhoskovski was looking for, it wasn’t there. Their captor seemed to grow furious. He drew a knife. “Here.” He tossed it onto the ground, then drew a small pistol from his pocket. “Go on,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “The seam. Check the inside of his coat.”

  She did. And then cut the belt in two, sliced the heels from the boots, and, finally, opened up the captain’s chest to check the remains of his stomach.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said. “Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not here.” She held out the knife. It was dripping with rotten gore, as were her arms, her clothes.

  “Drop it,” he said, and stalked away. After six paces, he spun around, his vile grin returning. “But you are both alive. You are both alive! Good. Come with me. Ah, no,” he added, taking in Flora’s gore-splattered clothes. “Not you. You,” he added to Liam. “You come with me. As for you… no, we may need you. Strip her. Search her. Oh, and find her some new clothes. And you, my friend,” he added, gesturing that Liam should walk ahead of him. “Tell me, do you like boats?”

  Liam didn’t reply, and Rhoskovski said no more, but Flora knew exactly where he was taking him, and what Liam’s fate would be. And she knew what hers would be, too. What she didn’t know was what Rhoskovski was looking for on the body of the dead captain.

  Part Two

  Jay’s First Trip Abroad

  Day 257

  25th November

  Chapter 3 - A Watched Phone Never Rings

  The Tower of London

  Nilda had been staring at the sat-phone for so long her eyes had become unfocused. She stretched, pushing the replica throne back across the floor, but the chair’s legs caught in the threads of the ornate rug and tilted sideways. To stop herself falling, she grabbed the edge of the altar-table. In turn, it rocked, nearly sending the pewter candlestick tumbling. She caught the candle, but not before liquid wax extinguished the flame.

  “Perfect.”

  Carefully, deliberately, she placed the candle back on the table, carried the replica throne to the side of the room, and straightened the rug.

  She didn’t need the candle, not really. The chamber’s windows were narrow, but they let in enough light to see the sat-phone’s display. The candle had been for comfort and company during her lonely vigil. Her hand went to the torch pinned to her belt next to the scabbard for her sword and the pouch with the spare ammunition for her submachine gun. The wind-up light had been a recent find, one of twelve looted from 20 Fenchurch Street, one of the steel and glass monoliths that dominated the skyline near the Tower. There’d been no need for the excursion, and with departure imminent there’d been no enthusiasm for playing the tourist. The torches had been found in the basement security offices, no doubt there more due to an insurance policy than for use in a real emergency. A more powerful battery-lamp was in her bag, and that was in her room where she’d packed it the moment Chester had called with news of the horde in Birmingham and that those undead were heading south.

  She walked over to the window where the sat-phone was perched, its stubby aerial directed up at the cloud-covered sky. A moment’s baseless panic had her pressing the keypad, but the battery indicator was still at fifty percent. She put the phone down and looked about the dim chamber.

  According to a plaque, the room had been furnished to mimic King Edward I’s private audience chamber. The rest of the furniture, the wall hangings, the cushions, the benches, the weapons, had been claimed by one survivor or another. Only rug, throne, and table had been left behind. The candlestick, one of the more thoroughly useful items in the working museum, had been gathering dust on a windowsill in the Keep.

  “Should have brought a sofa up here,” she said to herself, collapsing onto the throne. Assuming it was an accurate replica, and assuming that the king had the most comfortable of furnishings, what did that say about the lives of the everyday folk? Nothing good.

  “I told you we’d find her here,” George Tull said, leaning against the doorway.

  The apocalypse had given the old man a new lease on life, but though he had a smile on his lips, the lines on his face said the interest payments on that lease were taking their toll. Nilda knew that she didn’t look any better. With departure so near, the nightmare ten months of fear and fighting, of radiation poisoning, of illness, of pain, of death after death, witnessed and wrought, had caught up with her. Jay, though, had changed the most. Her son, standing just behind George, was utterly changed from the sullen teenager she’d had to yell out of bed just a year before. In place of the overweight, under-muscled recluse was a young man who grew another inch each week, and who grew more and more like his long-dead father with each passing day.

  “They haven’t called yet,” Nilda said, gesturing at the phone.

  “Why don’t you go for a walk?” Jay said. “You could take the phone with you.”

  “And risk the signal cutting out because it’s blocked by stone walls?” she said. “Or, worse, that I drop the phone and break it. No, it stays here until we leave.”

  “You don’t have to do the same,” George said. “It takes me back, though. I remember when you’d have to pre-arrange when a phone call would be made, and have no choice but wait for the phone to ring.”

  Jay blinked in confusion. “You’d call someone up just to tell them when you’d call them?”

  “No, you’d write a letter to tell them you were going to phone,” George said.

  “A letter? Seriously?” Jay asked, confusion slipping into a smile of disbelief.

  “Phone calls were more expensive than stamps,” George said. “More unreliable, too.”

  “Sure,” Jay said, clearly not believing the old man. “Anyway, Mum, if you won’t take the phone with you, I’ll sit here and wait while you get some air. I don’t mind. I want to finish my book.” He held it up. “Neville Chamberlain. It’s not as good as the book on Attlee.”

  “It’s because you know how the story ends,” George said. “I’ve a good one on Nye Bevan. He’s got a lesson or three applicable to our current situation.”

  “Cool, thanks, but when I’ve finished this,” Jay said.

  “And now I have heard everything; my son wants to finish a history book,” Nilda said. “I will go for a walk before I wake up and realise it was all a dream.”

  “Yeah, you know that’s not really funny,” Jay said.

  “Wait until you have a child,” Nilda said. “A parent has to find her jokes where she can.” She gave the phone one last glance, then followed George through the chamber door.

  “You best go first,” George said indicating the steep and worn spiral staircase.

  “Are your knees playing up?” she asked.

  “Constantly,” George said. “No update, then?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I broke half an hour ago and called Kallie, but not much has changed since she called at dawn. Leon has reached
the Thames Estuary. He thinks he might arrive tonight, depending on the tides. We’ll leave tomorrow. One more day. One last day.” Her scavenged shoes tapped on the worn stone, her footsteps echoing dully off the centuries-old walls. “One last day and then we’ll leave here for good.”

  “Until you return,” George said.

  “If we ever return. And if we do, if we have to, what does that say about the world we’re about to create?”

  “You’ve done all you can here,” George said.

  “But with so much ahead of us, I feel like I should be doing more. Anyway, the admiral is still on her way to Dundalk. She should arrive in a couple of hours. The New World is still in the Irish Sea, but Mary and Kim should see the open ocean before dark.”

  “And Elysium?”

  “It’s much the same,” she said. “They’re still picking up the pieces after the assault by the undead. Kim might have found a hospital full of dead zombies in Dundalk, but the undead in western Ireland are as active and dangerous as ever. While I don’t think Kallie was keeping anything back, I don’t think she knows everything that’s going on. I wish I could have spoken to the admiral herself.”

  “I’d say she’s a tad busy now she’s been elected leader.”

  “Only of the people who were in Belfast,” Nilda said.

  “And she’s already the de facto leader of those in Elysium,” George said. “There aren’t nearly enough of us to have factions, so, since she can command the largest two groups, that makes her the boss.”

  “And you don’t mind?” Nilda asked.

  “Me? Not in the slightest, but I was never in charge of anything. Middle-management was as high as I rose in the old world. Perhaps if it had been a more equitable society, I’d have risen higher, but not by choice. I never felt comfortable having people’s livelihoods in my hand, let alone their lives.”

  “Mary, then, do you think she’ll mind?”

  “I think the arrangement is that Mary is head of state to the admiral’s head of government. It’s a reasonable compromise, and a good enough one for now. We can keep ourselves entertained over the winter thrashing out a constitution.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps we should crown Mary as queen,” Nilda said. “We’ve got the crowns, after all.”

  “That might be a step too far for her republican soul,” George said. He stopped.

  “Are you okay?” Nilda asked.

  “Down is easier than up,” George said. “But to walk down some stairs, you’ve got to climb them first. Call it a delayed twinge. What about the horde?”

  “Apparently there’s too much cloud,” Nilda said. “Which I think is code for them being too busy to have checked. And when I say them, I’m worried it’s just that girl, Kallie.”

  “She’s a sensible lass,” George said.

  “And she seems competent, but there should be more people examining the satellite images. Kallie says that there are, but that they’re looking at the images of France.”

  “But that’s what you want,” George said. “And I’m ready for round two, off you go.”

  Nilda resumed her descent. “I suppose my worry is that they’re looking at the images of Calais and the ships in the harbour, not really looking for Chester.”

  “They’ve not found the plane, then?” George asked.

  “Not yet, but there’s so much cloud they could have missed it.” She sighed. “Honestly, George, what are the chances of actually finding a crashed plane somewhere in France? How would we even know it was their plane? Next to none.”

  “You’ve had too much time to think, and that’s because you’ve done everything you can. You’ve stashed spears and swords in the bunker beneath Whitehall, and ammo, guns, and ration packs in the dungeons here. If the horde misses London, we can collect them in the spring. If the city is trampled to dust like Birmingham, your son can dig them up a decade from now. That’s a real buried treasure worth knowing of.”

  “It’s not much, is it?” Nilda said. “If the horde didn’t exist, we could— well, no, we couldn’t stay in London, not all of us, but we wouldn’t be leaving so hastily that so much had to be abandoned.”

  “But the horde does exist,” George said. “And so we must leave and begin our next adventure. Our path is set. When Leon arrives, we’ll travel to Calais. For the next three days, what’s there to think about?”

  “And if the ships in the harbour are useless? They said that one of them is almost certainly flooded, and they still don’t have proper images of all the others.”

  “It’s sinking or it’s not,” George said. “The ships can be salvaged, or they can’t. That can’t be changed. And there’s nothing you or I can do to find other ships. That’s the admiral’s job. Or it’s Kallie’s, or Sholto’s, or whoever’s looking at those satellite images. We can’t do anything about the horde, and we can’t do anything about Calais except see what it’s like when we get there.” He paused again as he reached the door leading out onto the courtyard. “And there’s nothing we can do about the weather, though it’s not raining now. That’s something.”

  The cobbles were damp and the sky was heavy with clouds, but the deluge was being restrained, for now.

  “And what happens if the ships in Calais can’t be fixed?” Nilda asked. “If they can, then I can guess where the admiral will want us to go, America. That wouldn’t be so bad if Chester was here, but—” She stopped. “But what if they can’t be fixed, what then?”

  “We look for ships that can be fixed,” George said. “But that’s a problem for three days’ time.”

  Nilda nodded. And perhaps it wasn’t a problem she’d personally have to face. “You’re right, let’s not worry about it until we have to.”

  Simone sprinted past, a cadre of girls following. Their clothing was a colourful mix of what the adults had salvaged, embellished with scarves and swatches taken from the costumes among the museum’s exhibits. This made Janine’s gang recognisable from a mile off, though they were missing their leader. Seven-year-old Tarquin trailed after them, his arms and knees pumping as he struggled to keep up.

  “Careful on the—” Nilda began, but Tarquin slipped and fell before Nilda could finish. He quickly hauled himself to his feet. Ahead, Simone turned around, took a step towards Tarquin, saw Nilda, and sprinted away even faster, motioning for the others to keep up. Nilda managed three steps before Tarquin scrambled to his feet, and limped away.

  The children had been rescued from a mansion in Kent by Chester, Greta, and Eamonn. Before that, they’d come from an enclave along the Kent coast. But last year, they’d been students at an expensive boarding school. They were the children of diplomats and ambassadors, and if not the great and good, at least the wealthy enough to pack a child off to a place they’d be neither seen nor heard. And then there was Simone.

  “She’s up to something,” George said as Simone, then the rest of Janine’s gang disappeared through an archway, Tarquin trailing at the rear.

  “Simone is always up to something,” Nilda said. “There’ll be a fire at the dining hall, but there’s somewhere I want to go first. I can meet you at the refectory.”

  “No, I can guess where you want to go. I’d like to visit there myself,” George said.

  Nilda pulled her hood over her head, offered her arm to George, and walked out across the damp cobbles.

  The Tower was busier than usual. People walked alone, together, sometimes hand in hand, while children sprinted in between, playing one of their never-ending games with ancient relics. With departure imminent, chores had been abandoned, and there had been so many just to keep the ancient castle habitable: laundry and dish washing; fetching, filtering, and boiling water; finding and splitting firewood; not to mention the never-ending search for soap and toilet paper. But none of those could even begin until the patrol had finished their daily check on the barricades that kept the undead away from the fortress.

  “And I thought managing a household of two back in Penrith was a struggle,” Nilda
said.

  “What’s that?” George asked.

  “I was just thinking of the work required to keep things ticking along,” she said.

  “I used to like doing the housework,” George said. “Not that I did my fair share. It’s something I missed when I went into the retirement home. It was the loss of freedom, I suppose, the lack of control.”

  “Personally, I don’t mind not having to clean the toilets first thing,” Nilda said. “Fifty children to tidy up after? And some of the adults aren’t much better. Still, yes, I can see myself missing it in the days to come. It’s electricity. That’s what makes the difference between a chore and a struggle. Its absence is why we’re barely coping. It’s why we have to leave. I need to remember that. This trip to Calais, this search for Chester, it’s a sideshow, a distraction. There’s no future living like we have been here.”

  “Somewhere like Anglesey’s the answer,” George said.

  “Though without a nuclear power station that’s liable to melt down,” she said. “But where do we find it?”

  “And that’s the million-dollar question.”

  As they reached the gate in the northern wall, out of habit her hand dropped to the short sword at her belt. Like all their firearms and most of their food, the submachine gun on her back had come from a stash Quigley had left in a bunker beneath Horse Guards Parade. Considering the night-sights and suppressors stored with the weapons, the consensus was that they’d been purchased for covert operations. The calibre was different from the SA80s that had been common on Anglesey. Not that it mattered. There wouldn’t be room on Leon’s boats to take much ammunition with them. Within a month, she’d have no choice but to use her sword, but until then… She unslung the submachine gun.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “It was clear an hour ago,” George said, but he unbuttoned the holster at his belt just the same.

  Outside lay a small park that had once contained the castle’s moat. Piles of crumbling stones squatted behind railings, marked with plaques recording a few key events that had taken place in the buildings they’d once been. A smattering of benches had been added in insufficient deference to the tens of thousands of workers seeking quiet respite from their daily grind.