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

by Tayell, Frank

  “Right. Yes. Of course,” she said. “Come on, we’re falling behind.”

  Jay was right, they had been asking themselves that question for months, and knew there would be no real answer for months more, perhaps years. In many ways, that question was a mask for her real fear, of what would happen if they reached Calais and found the ships couldn’t be repaired. The New World would return to Ireland, to rescue a besieged admiral, leaving them stranded in that harbour. Rather than having left the Tower to voyage to a new, safer, better refuge, their nightmare might only be beginning.

  Five minutes later, Leon stopped again. This time he didn’t fire his rifle. He remained motionless until everyone had caught up.

  The colonel shone his light on the fence. “We’re here.”

  “Are you sure? Of course you are,” Nilda said. “It didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. There’s a gate further along the wire.”

  “Watch out for zombies,” Jay said. “Crawling zombies. There were a lot inside.”

  The colonel gave a curt nod, and again took the lead.

  As they followed the fence, and shone their torches through it, the light caught wing-mirrors and windows, and the reflector-strips on rear bumpers. That second-hand gleam caused the frost to glisten, except for a twenty-metre-wide, ten-metre-deep section by the gate itself. As they approached, the darkness moved, writhed, turned, and twisted.

  “Told you,” Jay said.

  Over fifty of the undead crawled across each other as they clawed at the ephemeral beams of light.

  “Kevin, how good are you with that spear? Can you—” Nilda began, but Leon interrupted her with a shot. A second. A third. One suppressed shot followed another. The sound of lead cracking bone drowned the whisper from the barrel as the colonel jerked the rifle left, then right. Her torch’s beam barely had time to settle on a target before he fired and moved to the next. An unexpectedly loud clatter came as the empty magazine fell to the roadway. A click as a fresh was inserted. A near-silent whispered shot as the firing resumed, and with each shot, Leon uttered a word. No, he was reciting names. Were they the names of friends, of foes, of the fallen, of the lost? She didn’t ask, but turned her gaze to the horizon. It was brightening. Dawn was on its way. And as if on cue, her torch flickered.

  “If I were superstitious, I’d take that as an omen,” she said loudly.

  Finally, Leon paused.

  “My torch, it keeps flickering,” Nilda said calmly. “Have you got them all?”

  The pile of undead was motionless save for a single creature at the rear. The zombie’s legs were missing below the knees. Its arms worked, though its hands were missing the ends of each finger. It raised its right arm up, high in the sky, bringing it down in a windmill-motion onto the back of the dead creature in front. It was inefficient, but it moved the creature a few inches closer to the gate. Leon fired.

  “C’est fini.”

  And from the uncertainty in the faces of his people, they, like her, worried he was talking about himself, not the task at hand. She frowned, then smiled. She could see their expressions, though they were shrouded in shadow. Dawn had arrived. She switched off her torch.

  “Another few minutes, and we’ll be able to see properly,” she said. “We’ll split into two teams. Leon, can you take your people and find diesel vehicles where the fuel caps haven’t been opened? Find some wire, check the contents of the tanks. We should have brought some paint or something to mark them.”

  “They could tear some cloth from the seats and tie it to the aerials,” Jay said.

  “Do that,” Nilda said. “From our first time here, there’s only a few miles of fuel in each tank. We’ll need a lot of vehicles.”

  “And you?” Leon asked.

  “We’ll find the containers to put it in,” Nilda said. “With so many vehicles, they had to have been prepared for some breakdowns. That means tow-trucks. And since one of the most common problems must have been a vehicle running out of fuel, where we find the tow trucks, we’ll find containers. Maybe we’ll find their fuel reserve there. We’re not the first to loot this port, but we might get lucky.”

  “We have used up our luck,” Leon said.

  “And then we should make some more,” Nilda said. “Shall we?”

  Nilda threw one last backward glance at Leon, before scanning for movement and shadows behind and beneath the nearby cars. In their small party, Jennings had the lead, Denby the rear, she the left, Kevin the right, with Jay in the middle. She didn’t need to remind Jay and Kevin not to talk. The memory of their last trip to the import-lot, when a crawling zombie gashed Jay’s leg, was fresh in everyone’s minds.

  The broken wind turbines towering over the port facility acted as a marker by which she could judge their progress. Each time she dared tear her gaze from the drifts of leaves gathered around the near-identical cars, the turbines were a little more distinct, the damage a little clearer. As they moved deeper into the facility, the cars grew more numerous and more tightly packed until they reached a lonely quintet of grass-green Jeeps. Just beyond squatted a one-and-a-half storey garage with unpainted-cladding walls, adorned with nothing except a trio of security cameras in each corner. Preventing the horizontal sliding gates from properly closing was…

  “A tow truck!” Jay said. “That’s what we were looking for, right?”

  “We’re looking for empty containers,” Nilda said. “Norm, Viola, keep watch out here. Kevin, check those Jeeps. See if they come with a branded fuel-can. Jay, I’m going in first. If there are zombies, we retreat outside, face them in the daylight.” She’d spoken loudly, loud enough for the words to carry into the garage’s gloomy interior, but no sound came in reply. Even so, that sense of impending danger grew. Between the truck’s passenger-side and the wall was a two-foot gap. On the other side, the gate had been pulled right up to the door. Someone had clearly opened the doors wide enough to drive the vehicle out, but then stopped. They’d closed one half of the gates, but not the other, nor had they driven all the way out, or reversed back inside. Why?

  As she reached the vehicle’s cab, she unclipped her torch from her belt, wiped her sleeve against the glass, and shone the light inside. The keys were in the ignition. Her light went out.

  “Norm, your torch!” she called. Jennings unclipped it, threw it, and she caught it while Jay walked towards the three-foot-wide gap, and the darkness beyond.

  “There’s something in there!” Jay said, raising his spear. The weapon had come from the Tower’s royal collection, though Nilda wasn’t sure to which ancient king it had once belonged. Two feet of steel, engraved with a lion on one side, a cross on the other. The spearhead had been attached to a ten-foot-long oak shaft until Jay had followed George’s example and cut the pole down to the same length as the blade. His modification was a work in progress. The weapon still required two hands to wield properly, meaning one hand awkwardly gripped both torch and spear-shaft when the zombie staggered through the doorway. Its wildly waving arms slammed into the truck as the creature lurched towards him.

  Jay thrust, but he didn’t have sufficient control of the spear. The point plunged towards the creature’s eye, but its grasping hand knocked into the blade. The metal was razor-sharp, and cut bone-deep into the zombie’s palm, but that hand kept moving, dragging the spear down even as the blade sliced deeper into rotting flesh. Jay stepped back, tugging at his weapon as the zombie stepped after him. And then the creature crumpled, a bullet in its brain.

  “Should have stuck with the mace,” Denby said, lowering her rifle.

  “Nah, I told you, the mace is for Chester,” Jay said, belatedly remembering to add, “Thanks.”

  Nilda stepped over the corpse, and into the gloom.

  “Hello?” she called, and got no reply. She played the light over the unprepossessing space. Two more trucks were parked inside, on the far side of a trio of steel girders that supported the centre of the roof.

  “There,” Jay said. “That’s what we�
�re after.” He shone his light against a side wall where there were three large racks, one and a half of which contained identical red-plastic jerry-cans. “Just like you said, Mum. More good luck, right?”

  “Hmm. No. Maybe.”

  “There’s loads of tow-cables here,” Jay said. “And quite a lot of… what do you call them? For lifting cars so you can change a wheel?”

  “Jacks,” Nilda said. “But we’re missing… well, we’re missing quite a lot.”

  “Like what?” Jay asked.

  “It’s always difficult to know what’s missing when it’s gone,” she said, scanning the long workbench that took up half of the rear wall. “But yes, it’s like I thought. This garage is for tow trucks, used to move stalled vehicles so as not to delay the loading and unloading.”

  “But they wouldn’t be repaired here, right?” Jay asked. “Because the cars don’t belong to the port.”

  “Hmm? No. There’s a handcart over in the corner. Start loading the fuel cans. Maybe some of those tow cables as well. I don’t think there’s anything else in here we need.”

  “We need some tubing to suck out the fuel,” Jay said. “Maybe there’s some in that office. Like from a water cooler or something.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Nilda said. “Load the cart.” She checked her watch. It was nearly an hour since they’d left the jetty. She walked back to the half-open gate. “We’ve found the containers,” she called. “Five minutes, and we’ll head back to Leon. Check the Jeeps. See if the batteries are flat.”

  She went back inside, and turned her attention to the office. It had a five-foot-wide window, but the blind was closed. She tried the door, and found it locked. She listened, but the only sounds came from Jay throwing the empty plastic containers onto the cart, interspersed with the occasional muffled clunk of a car door opening outside.

  There were no crowbars or levers left on the tool-rack, but a tyre-iron lay on the floor. She pressed the chiselled end into the gap between door and frame and heaved. The frame cracked, but the door didn’t move. She tried again, but something was blocking the door.

  “How are you doing, Jay?”

  “Nearly done.”

  She leaned closer to the door, triple-checking no sounds came from inside. A squeak came from behind her, and then a hollow clatter.

  “Sorry, they fell off the cart,” Jay said. “Hang on, I’ll tie them on.”

  “Come over here first,” Nilda said.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The office door’s barricaded. I think the room’s empty, but I want to be sure.”

  “You don’t want to just leave it be?” Jay asked.

  “No,” Nilda said. “There’s something that’s bothering me.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment. Just be ready.”

  She swung the tyre-iron into the window. Glass shattered, bouncing off the closed blind to spray across her feet. She shook the glass free from her shoes, then crunched over more as she used the tyre-iron to push the blind aside. Something large and wooden was propped beyond the blind, but when she pushed, it collapsed into the room.

  “Nothing in here. Just a body,” she said. “Yes, just a dead body. Okay, finish loading the cart, and take it outside. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  “Why? What is it?” Jay asked.

  “Two things really,” Nilda said. “And the first is that we don’t have time to waste, so go on, get those fuel cans outside.”

  She cleared the glass from the frame and climbed into the office. The body was long dead, nearly mummified, and clearly not infected. From the strands of blonde hair on its scalp, and lack of hair on the fragments of skin remaining on its shattered jawbone, the corpse had probably been female, but possibly not. The figure beneath the dungarees and leather jacket was utterly formless. The body sprawled in a chair, arms hanging low by its sides. A knife lay beneath the right hand. A horizontal gash ran halfway along the arm, but as time had brought decay, the skin had torn, making it unclear whether that was a self-inflicted mercy-cut or a wound from war. It didn’t matter. Nilda was after clues as to the corpse’s origins, but found none in the clothes. A leather backpack lay in the corner of the room. It wasn’t something a hiker would use, but perhaps something a scavenger might take. Inside was… no notebook, but there were a pair of food cans. The picture implied mixed vegetables, or possibly stew. She wasn’t sure because the writing was in German. That was as much confirmation as she’d get.

  “You ready, Mum?” Jay called.

  Nilda took the cans, and clambered back outside. “Ready enough.”

  “You found food, cool,” Jay said. “What is it?”

  “Not too sure,” Nilda said. “Vegetables, I think.”

  “Oh, brilliant!”

  Nilda laughed. “Seriously? It’s taken the end of the world for you to think vegetables are brilliant?”

  “Yeah, well, you know?” Jay mumbled, blushing.

  “The Jeep’s batteries are flat,” Jennings said, when they got outside. “But we saw something interesting behind the building. Two fuel pumps. Diesel and petrol.”

  “They’re empty, right?” Nilda said.

  “Aye,” Jennings said. “You knew?”

  “I guessed. Come on, we need to get back to Leon.”

  Twenty minutes later, Nilda wiped her sword clean on the van’s passenger seat. She closed the door, then stepped over the corpse of the zombie that had crawled out from underneath.

  “How many zombies is that?” she asked.

  “Nineteen,” Leon said.

  “And we only saw one at the tow-yard. Do you think they headed towards the seafront because of the waves, or towards the bridge because of the explosion?”

  The Frenchman shrugged, then continued his slow patrol of the perimeter. He’d placed Hugo on the roof of a van as a lookout. Nilda had deployed Denby on another van slightly further inland. She and Leon were walking a slow patrol around the rest who were now, just as slowly, gathering fuel. Very slowly. Too slowly.

  “Another container’s full, Mum,” Jay called out as they neared him. “And I checked the engine. The battery was flat.”

  “I think they all will be,” Nilda said.

  “Do you think we could take a battery down to the ship, charge it, then bring it back here?” Jay asked.

  “Not in the time we have,” she said, and found herself looking at her watch. “How many containers have we filled?”

  “About twenty, I think.”

  “You better get back to it, then,” Nilda said.

  It was a task they were all expert at, but it was taking too long. Too many of the vehicles had no fuel left at all, and the rest had very little. Three hours had elapsed since they’d left the shore. Dawn had arrived, though the sun struggled to pierce the clouds. It was promising to be another cold day, another hungry day, and there wouldn’t be a hot meal until they’d charged the boat’s batteries. Yes, they needed the diesel, but they needed stoves, too. And firewood, clothes, blankets. They needed water, and more was consumed with each passing hour. How much diesel did they really need? The wind was picking up, and surely that would carry them to France. Once in Calais, they could light a fire on the deck of a ship, even if, in her mind’s eye, that ship bore a striking similarity to the Titanic. No, even if they stayed here all day, even if they found and filled a hundred more fuel containers, they’d still be using sail for most of the journey.

  “All right, time’s up!” she called. “Finish what you’re doing, and we’ll head back.”

  “But most of these containers are still empty,” Jay said.

  “We’ll use them to carry water,” Nilda said. “We need that more than diesel. And when we get to Calais, we won’t need diesel at all. No, it’s time we went to France.” She looked across to Leon.

  For the first time since she’d met him, the French soldier smiled.

  The trolley’s wheels squeaked, but using the cart left more hands fr
ee to keep weapons raised, something for which they were grateful three times during the journey to the gate. There, the undead were piled so thickly, they couldn’t push the trolley through or over. Instead, they cut a hole in the fence to the west.

  “Mum?” Jay said as they half carried, half pushed the laden cart through the fence. “Earlier, you said there were two reasons you wanted to look in that office. The first was that we were running out of time. What was the second?”

  “What office?” Leon asked.

  “In the garage where we found the tow-trucks,” Nilda said. “A body lay inside. Not a zombie. Possibly someone who was immune.”

  “So what were you looking for?” Jay asked.

  “I wanted to know where these people came from,” Nilda said. “Not just that person in the office, but the people who came looking for fuel before us. The last time we were here, we came ashore a little closer to the bridge. At a chemical plant, we found some undead, and some bags, some bicycles. In those bags we found a journal, in French.”

  “En Français? I would like to see that,” Leon said.

  “Sure,” Nilda said. “It would help if we knew what they’d written, and when they came here, but what I really want to know is where they came from. According to what was seen on the satellites, the ships in Calais weren’t British. There’s a Russian warship, a Norwegian postal-ship. The label on the cans I found in that office were in German. So, while some people from England might have fled to France, and run their small boats aground near Dunkirk, I think the people from the European mainland came here. If they fled from there, we’ll find it no better than what we’re leaving behind.”

  “We’ll know tonight,” Leon said.

  “Arrête! Goule!” Camille called, pointing her rifle to the left. It wasn’t just one of the undead, it was ten, one field away, clambering over a slight rise.

  “Colonel?” Hugo asked.

  “Boss?” Jennings asked, in that same tone, though a little louder.

  “I say leave them,” she said. “We don’t have time to kill them today, and I honestly don’t know if we’ll ever come back. Let’s save our bullets for France. Colonel?”