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

by Tayell, Frank

  “Pierre spotted mussels clinging to the concrete,” Nilda said when she returned, once more, to the seawall.

  “Mussels, fries, and beer,” Tuck signed. “You can’t beat Belgium.”

  “You’ve visited before?” Nilda asked.

  “Can’t describe this as visiting, but yes,” Tuck signed. “A few long weekends.”

  “Oh?” Nilda waited for the soldier to go on. Tuck was a closed book when it came to her past. That tome would occasionally crack open with a reference to a place in which she’d served, a landmark she’d visited, or, rarely, someone she’d once known. But too often the book would slam closed with barely more than a footnote shared about the soldier’s previous, and very private, life.

  “We shouldn’t eat the mussels, though,” Tuck signed.

  “No, Pierre said the same,” Nilda said. She decided to opt for the direct approach. “When did you visit Belgium?”

  “He’s signalling,” Tuck signed, pointing ahead to where Jennings stood, a hundred metres further along the seawall. “We should catch up.”

  She moved in front of Nilda. Because Tuck was a closed book, Nilda had learned to read the cover. Whenever the soldier wanted to shut down a conversation, she’d make sure she couldn’t see other people’s lips.

  The seawall ended, widening into the working side of the northern half of the harbour. Charred wood, burned plastic, and melted metal littered the muddy waste-ground. A one-storey warehouse had been reduced to an irregular square of concrete boulders. Just beyond, bridged by a collapsed crane, a jagged crater had been ripped out of the asphalt.

  “Underground fuel storage,” Jennings said.

  “Filling it, is that seawater or rain?” Nilda asked.

  “Not sure, but I wouldn’t drink it,” he said.

  They picked a path through the debris, using a solitary red shipping container as their marker. She couldn’t see any crane nearby, and the closest partially sunk ship appeared to be some kind of passenger-ferry. Either the container had landed there after some massive explosion, or the truck carrying it had been utterly disintegrated by the blast. Enough twisted metal was scattered beneath the slimy mud for the latter to be true, yet there was no damage to the shipping container itself.

  “No one’s opened it,” Tuck signed. She gave the customs seal a tug, then rubbed away enough of the grime that she could read it. “Came from Brazil,” she signed.

  “Sorry, where?” Nilda asked.

  Tuck mouthed the name.

  “Brazil?” Nilda asked.

  “Where the nuts come from, right?” Jennings said.

  “I suppose so,” Nilda said. “Though I expect they exported far more than that. Check the rear.”

  The submariner traipsed around the container’s side while Nilda scanned the harbour. “No ships nearby,” she said. “And would a ship from Brazil come here? Wouldn’t it have gone to Rotterdam?”

  “Not if it arrived after the outbreak,” Tuck signed. “Remember how the Royal Navy sank all shipping? The vessel was looking for any safe harbour it could find.”

  “The container looks intact,” Jennings called. “Can’t say the same for the body beneath, though. Just the legs visible, and they’re only bones. Pecked clean.”

  “I doubt there’s food in there,” Nilda said. “But it’s worth a look. Whatever is inside, we don’t have it.”

  Tuck tried the handle, but it didn’t move. She kicked at the mud, picked up a five-foot length of rebar still partially covered in concrete. She motioned Nilda to step aside, slammed it between the locking mechanism and the frame, and heaved. The rebar bent, but the mechanism clicked, and the door flew open.

  Nilda and Tuck both jumped back as a shining black mass poured out of the container. Nilda stepped back again. Her first thought was oil. Then the mass moved, fluttered, writhed.

  “Insects! Cockroaches!” She stepped back again, hurriedly, and slipped on the mud. “Thousands of them!”

  A few took flight while the others crawled and poured across the battered asphalt.

  Nilda looked over at Tuck, standing perfectly serene, silently laughing, on the other side of the grotesque river.

  “Yes, very funny,” Nilda said, picking herself up. “I’ll take the long way around. Meet you guys at that broken tower about fifty metres away.”

  Jennings was grinning when Nilda reached the scaffolding tower. Tuck was doing her best not to smirk.

  “I’m not sure why you think the joke is on me,” she said.

  Jennings’ grin only grew wider. “Didn’t they say, only things to survive the apocalypse would be cockroaches and taxes? Turns out they were half right.”

  “Had to have been a hole beneath the container,” Nilda said. “Anyway…” She looked back at the rubble and debris behind them, then ahead at the broken cranes and fractured buildings, then at the tower. “Can you climb up there, Norm, see if you can get a view of what’s ahead?”

  “Aye, aye, boss,” he said, slung his rifle, and began to climb.

  The tower was small, with a triangular base fifty centimetres long on each side, made of white-coated tubing angling upwards for five metres until it reached the jagged point where the top, and so the tower’s purpose, had been ripped away. The tower had been erected at the point where the concrete harbour met the shore. To the north were beaches. To the south, the harbour extended inland, a wide basin of water suitable for the loading and unloading of dozens of ships at a time, but those wrecks, and the ruins beyond, looked little different to her first sight back at the very edge of the seawall.

  She walked north, to the barrier, and looked over at the beach. Two craft lay on the sand: a small-masted fishing boat, and a forty-foot long motor boat. Inland, chimneys marked homes otherwise shrouded by bare-branched trees, but no smoke came from any of them.

  “What do you think, Tuck?” she asked. “Could we live here?”

  “In this harbour?” Tuck signed. “With those… those…” She paused. With a shrug, she settled for “Insects. This place is a ruin. It’s dead.”

  “Okay, not here, but somewhere like this? One port will be much like another.”

  “Exactly. Didn’t they say that Dunkirk was a ruin, too?”

  “But Calais isn’t,” Nilda said. “This isn’t quite a castle, but it has most of the features. The sea protects us from the west. Any zombies that make it to the beach would be washed from their feet by the waves. They couldn’t climb these walls.”

  “The moat doesn’t stretch all the way around,” Tuck signed.

  “No, but we’ve plenty with which to build a wall.”

  “There’s no shelter,” Tuck signed.

  “That’s true. But we can build that, too.”

  “Why would we want to?” the soldier signed.

  “In case the ships in Calais can’t be repaired,” Nilda said. “The admiral’s situation is increasingly desperate. The New World might have to go back to Ireland to rescue her and her people. That would mean offloading all the passengers currently on it.”

  “In Calais? And we’d stay there?”

  “If we can’t repair a ship, or if it can’t be done quickly,” Nilda said. “And then there’s the other question, if we do repair a ship, do we want to go with it? We need an alternative. I mean, is there any way, any other choice, but going with that ship to Ireland, then with the admiral across to America?”

  Tuck nodded. “I understand.” She scanned the shore, the harbour, the debris. “Not here. No, we couldn’t stay here. Calais? A port that isn’t a ruin? Maybe. If we still have the sailing boats. It’s impossible to say until we reach Calais, but a harbour isn’t a castle. Calais isn’t London. It will be harder, more dangerous. Do we keep the children with us, or do we send them away? They were sent away, once before, to that boarding school.”

  “That’s true. I don’t know that they should be sent away again.”

  Tuck shook her head. “No, that’s not what I meant. They were sent away once, and survi
ved while their parents certainly died. They could cope with it. The question is whether we could.”

  Jennings clambered back down the scaffolding.

  “There’s not much out there. Not in the harbour. We can search, and I suppose there’s stuff underground, but we’ll need pickaxes, crowbars and rope.”

  “And we’d need to find those first,” Nilda said. “What about the undead?”

  “I counted one on the beach, behind that fishing boat,” Jennings said. “Otherwise no. Inland’s a different story. Not about the zombies, I mean there’s less devastation. A few of the houses closest to the harbour look damaged. Broken windows, fallen tiles, the kind of damage you’d expect from close proximity to an explosion. Further inland, as far as I can tell, the buildings are untouched. If we want to scavenge, we should start there.”

  “It’s too late to venture far,” Tuck signed. “Too dark, anyway.”

  “Agreed,” Nilda said. “Only one zombie?”

  “Think so,” Jennings said. “Maybe Europe’s different. Maybe they are all dead here already. There is something, though. Just ahead, and north, there’s an access road. It’s hard to tell quite what route it takes, but I think it’s an emergency road linking the harbour with the mainland. On it, there’s a truck. It looks… odd. Sort of… clean. I don’t think it’s been here as long as everything else.”

  “I think we should take a look,” Nilda said. “If the battery is still live, we could drive to Calais.”

  “Drive? Even if there aren’t many zombies here, there’s bound to more inland,” Jennings said.

  “But we could still be in Calais in a couple of hours,” Nilda said. “By dawn, we’d know what the state the ships are in. And then… if there aren’t any we can salvage, we could return here and head north. Denmark and The Netherlands were nothing but ports and harbours. We can find our ships there.”

  “That’d take us further from the crashed plane,” Jennings said.

  “I know, but there are other considerations than Chester,” Nilda said. “Tuck?”

  The soldier shrugged, and began clambering over the rubble.

  Up close, the truck was barely discernible from the wrecks. Only the tyres, still inflated, proved that the vehicle had recently arrived.

  “Belgian plates,” Jennings said.

  “The fuel cap’s open,” Tuck signed.

  Nilda walked to the cab. “Empty,” she said. “Norm, can you check the battery?”

  “Aye, aye.” He opened the door. “A fair bit of rubbish in here. A few wrappers. Empty water bottle. Some bullet casings. Here, now this is interesting. It’s a U.S. MRE. Eaten, though.”

  “Plenty of military bases in Europe,” Tuck signed.

  “I think I found what they were shooting at,” Nilda said. She’d walked around to the far side of the vehicle. “Zombies. Three. All dead. And you can forget about the battery. This tyre’s gone. They were driving on the rims.”

  “It’s dead anyway,” Jennings said.

  “Probably arrived at night,” Tuck signed. “Killed the zombies, then stayed in the cab until the battery ran out. Left at dawn.”

  “Any clue where they went?” Nilda asked. “Or who they were, even?”

  “American ammo, American rations,” Jennings said. “But Tuck’s right, plenty of American bases in Europe. It doesn’t tell us much. Hang on, though. Look at that, further down the road. Before it meets that junction. Those cars don’t belong, do they? This truck had to have come up here, and those cars are blocking the road. They had to have arrived afterwards. Want to take a look?”

  Nilda glanced at the sky. “I think we’ve got time before we’ve completely lost the light.”

  There was no uniformity in the five cars: an SUV, a hatchback, a sedan, a people-carrier, and a flatbed truck bringing up the rear. Nor was their uniformity in colour or year. The only similarity was in the dents and mud covering the bodywork.

  “Corpse,” Jennings said, pointing into the SUV. He moved on to the hatchback. “Empty.”

  Nilda paused by the SUV as Tuck followed the submariner down the line of vehicles. The body was sitting in the vehicle’s passenger seat. Dead, but probably not undead, though it was too decayed to be certain.

  “No more bodies, boss,” Jennings called out. He’d climbed into the bed of the truck. “No more vehicles behind. Think this is the last of them. Some boxes here.”

  “Take a look inside,” she said. Perhaps he’d find something, because they were unlikely to find anything in the SUV. She moved to the rear, checking the number plate, then that of the hatchback. Both were from Belgium, which told her little.

  A loud clatter came from the truck. “It’s tools,” Jennings called. “Or maybe they’re weapons. Axes, pickaxes, crowbars. A few shovels in this one.”

  Nilda looked to Tuck, but the soldier’s back was to her. She was looking south towards the ruins of the harbour, and the city beyond.

  Nilda took a step towards her, then saw it. The zombie crawled through the mud from beneath the people-carrier. She’d not heard it over the racket that Jennings was making. The legless creature was four feet away from Tuck, its arms digging into the mud as it crawled towards the deaf soldier.

  “Tuck!” Nilda called, uselessly. The soldier stayed, staring ahead, but Jennings heard her.

  The submariner swung his rifle up. Tuck saw the movement, spinning around, looking down as the zombie flailed an arm towards her leg. She stepped back as Jennings fired. The zombie slumped into the mud.

  “And that’s our signal—” Nilda began, then felt the fingers curl around her ankle. She tried to turn around, but the zombie had too tight a grip. She spun a half circle, dragging her leg out of range of its snapping mouth, then kicked out with her free foot. Teeth flew as its jaw broke, but its grip didn’t loosen. She hacked her sword down, but the zombie bucked and rolled and the blade bit into dirt. She raised the blade again, this time plunging it into the zombie’s wrist, turning and twisting the sword to break sinew, crack bone, and tear flesh. She dragged the blade out and her leg back, ripping its hand from the ruined arm.

  “Up!” Jennings said. “Onto the cars! There’s dozens!”

  She jumped back, kicking the still-clinging hand free, turned, and saw them. Dozens of mud-smeared creatures crawled towards them. Jennings fired as Tuck jumped onto the bonnet of the sedan. Nilda clambered up the SUV’s tow bar, and onto the roof. She sheathed her sword and unslung the submachine gun, but held her fire as soldier and submariner aimed one measured shot after another into the crawling undead.

  “I think that’s it,” Jennings finally said. “I make that nineteen.”

  “All crawling,” Nilda said. “The vehicles must have ploughed into them.”

  “I’d say we’ve tempted luck enough for one day,” Jennings said. “And there’s no way we’re driving any of these anywhere. Time to go back, boss?”

  “Not yet,” Nilda said. “Finish checking those boxes. I want to see what’s over there to the north.”

  “Why?” Jennings asked.

  “Because the zombies weren’t underneath the vehicles,” Nilda said, pointing north. “They were a dozen yards over there. The passengers in these vehicles got out. They went that way. The zombies followed, at least for a while. There’s a house there.”

  “They won’t be there now,” Jennings said.

  “No, but they might have left a clue as to where they went, or where they came from,” Nilda said. “Tuck?”

  But the house was empty, right down to the drawers in both bedrooms. The few items the car’s passengers had discarded lay strewn on the mud-covered carpet.

  “Time to go back,” Tuck signed. “We’ve been gone too long.”

  Nilda followed her back down the stairs, out into the front garden, and onto the narrow road. “There’s more houses inland,” she said.

  “And there’s a city behind the port,” Tuck signed. “We could spend a month searching. We’ll find no one. Whoever they were, th
ey came here hoping to find a boat in the harbour. Instead they found a ruin, and the undead. There’s nothing here, Nilda.”

  “I suppose not.”

  They returned to the row of vehicles and found Jennings standing by a corpse.

  “Find anything?” Nilda asked.

  “Sort of,” Jennings said. “Nothing we need. But there’s this. This corpse. No way anyone could identify her now. Not now we shot her in the head. She’s got identity-discs, boss.”

  “She’s military?”

  “Healy, G,” Jennings said.

  “Do you know her?”

  “No, but she’s one of ours. Permission to bury her?”

  “What about the others?”

  “No tags,” Jennings said. “I didn’t look for any other forms of I.D. I’d like to bury her.”

  “Of course. But I better go back before someone comes looking for us.”

  Jay was waiting for her on the seawall.

  “You were gone a long time,” he said accusingly.

  “And you were supposed to wait on the boat,” she said. “It’s all fine. Just zombies.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Tuck and Norm found a body. A soldier. They’re burying her. And I’m afraid that’s all there is to say.” She turned to look back at the port. “All there is to see, too. Will you keep watch for them? They shouldn’t be long.”

  She climbed down the ladder. Jay wasn’t the only one who’d disobeyed the orders to stay on the boat. George was waiting at the ladder’s base.

  “Stretching my legs,” he said. “Cramp,” he added. “Tried to climb the ladder, but my knee locked. Thought I’d wait it out here. How is it?”

  “The harbour’s a ruin. Literally. Norm thinks a fuel tanker must have exploded. I think it might have been more than that, but I don’t think it matters. We’ll have to stay aboard the boats tonight.”

  “That won’t be so bad,” George said. “We’ll be in Calais tomorrow. We can all go ashore then.”

  “I suppose so,” she said.

  “You look like you need cheering up. A fish was caught. A bream. It was a bit of a group effort. Tarquin and Janine both claim credit.”