“Does she?”
“Tarquin says we do, so we can have them with the fish. I told him it was the wrong kind of mushrooms.”
“What fish?” Nilda asked.
“Oh, yeah, we caught some,” Simone said. “While we were waiting for Leon. Five. And proper fish, too. Not sharks. So… um… can I have your coat?”
“Of course, thank you.” She handed Simone her drenched jacket.
The lounge was only half full, though nearly everyone was inside. Kevin was setting small fires in metal trays. Long coat racks had been wheeled into one corner, and from them the children were hanging the coats while Giselle had gathered other children to take cushions out of their covers. Quite why, Nilda couldn’t guess, but the children were busy, and seemed happy.
Nilda stood near the door, shivering slightly, watching everyone. And she could see them. The naked flames flickered, but there were electric lights embedded in the floor, others along the ceiling. The ceiling and floor lights trailed lines through the room to the doors, but it was electricity. Leon was doing much as she was, watching everyone else, though from a corner near a closed door twenty feet to her left. She walked over.
“Are we really safe here?” she asked.
“What is safety? But we are safe for tonight,” the colonel said. “This deck is secure. I’ve seen no signs of fighting aboard, no blood, no ghouls. We will have to search each cabin, every crawlspace, but yes, for now, for tonight, we can sleep without fear of the darkness.”
“Good. And what do you make of this ship?”
“It is everything the admiral wants,” Leon said.
“And the engine room? The control room?”
“Intact. As far as a visual inspection can tell,” he said. “And that is all we can do until we have refuelled. It appears well maintained.”
“But we have power,” Nilda said.
“Emergency power,” Leon said. “The battery is designed to provide twenty-four hours of power without the generator being operational.”
“Oh.”
“But that was on a ship with eight thousand passengers and four thousand crew,” he said.
“Ah.”
“We have lights. The snow provides water, and we can open the doors for ventilation. I suggest we confine ourselves to this deck until The New World arrives.”
“You’re probably right,” Nilda said. “We’ve pushed our luck a fair bit over the last… gosh, it’s only been a couple of days.”
“And ashore?” he asked. “What did you find?”
“The passengers and crew from these ships drove out of here,” Nilda said. “They took warm clothing from the shops, and some other obvious supplies, but they didn’t strip the town bare. Did you look in any of the cabins?”
“A few,” Leon said. “They were tidy, but not clean. It is what you would expect from a ship that has spent this last year at sea.”
“Then we’ll need clothes, so we’ll have to go ashore. After the storm, I think.”
“And we should visit that Royal Navy ship,” Leon said.
“Agreed,” Nilda said. “What about the galley?”
“I haven’t ventured that far.”
“We might have to break the rule on exploring to see whether they’ve left anything behind there,” Nilda said. “But from the smell of fish, it can probably wait. Did you call the admiral?”
“I did. She called The New World. It will make straight for us, and should be here tomorrow. Perhaps tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Perhaps. We should keep our lights on and aimed out to sea.”
“Yes, of course. We have a ship,” she said. “Large enough for everyone in Ireland, and which appears in good repair. And we didn’t have to go to France.”
“No.”
“But we didn’t reach France,” she said.
“Yes.”
“We have to make a decision, don’t we?”
He finally turned to face her. “You do. Where you go, the children go. Where they go, Pierre and Giselle go. Where they go, I go. I owe that much to the past. But the decision doesn’t have to be made immediately.”
“No, but time is running out,” Nilda said. “How long will it take before this ship is ready to return to Ireland?”
“Assuming there is nothing that needs to be repaired, that the only reason this ship stopped here is because it is without power, then as long as it takes to refuel.”
“And I suppose we don’t need daylight for that,” she said. “So, yes, I have a decision to make. I think I’ll find a quiet corner where I can think.”
“Look what Lorraine found,” Jay said. “Oh, sorry, were you asleep?”
“I suppose that depends on what time it is,” Nilda said. “Did I miss dinner?”
“No. Pierre’s throwing a strop over how there’s no dill. George wanted to fry the fish, and Pierre said that the English always ruin everything by boiling or frying it. He says cod has to be served with dill and… well, dinner’ll be another five minutes.”
“Then I just closed my eyes. George and Pierre aren’t really fighting?”
“Nah, not really. It’s a bit of a show.”
She sat up. The lounge smelled a little more of smoke, and was noisier than earlier, but otherwise little had changed since she’d sat down and made the mistake of closing her eyes.
“What was it Lorraine found?” she asked.
“What? Oh, yeah. This. It’s the captain’s log.”
“Really?” She sat upright. “What does it say?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve only glanced at it. But, basically, they came from a place called Ascension.”
“That’s down near St Helena,” Nilda said.
“Where Napoleon was exiled? Cool. Well, that’s where they spent most of the last year.”
“Not the Mediterranean?” Nilda said.
“And not the Baltic,” Jay said. “Basically, they were pretty happy on the island, until there was a storm. They had an oil tanker, but it was dashed against the shore. It spilled oil over the coast. No more fishing, no more fuel. They had to leave.”
“So they came here?”
“They went to South Africa. Back in March and April, they’d been talking over the radio with these people in Cape Town. But those people had said they’d heard this message broadcast and rebroadcast, but which started off in Ukraine. Apparently there were millions of people there, in some industrial facilities along a river. That’s where they were heading.”
“Ukraine?”
“Yeah.
“They picked up the radio signal themselves?” Nilda asked. “Or it was heard by people in Cape Town? Or do you mean they were chasing a mangled and repeated, utterly unverifiable rumour from seven months ago?”
“Yeah, that. Pretty desperate, right? They didn’t find anyone in Cape Town when they got there. And they didn’t pick up any radio signals since. Nothing that’s mentioned here. It’s not very detailed.”
“They travelled all the way up the West African coast, and southern Europe, and they found no one?”
“Yeah, sorry. And it’s worse, actually. They didn’t find any safe ports either. Not with fuel. Not north of… hang on.” He opened the slim book, flipping through until he found the page. “Ah, yeah. Monrovia. George said that’s in Liberia.”
“They’ve found no fuel since there?”
“I don’t think so. The ports were either destroyed, overrun by the undead, or the fuel was gone,” Jay said.
“I see,” she said, doing her best not to show what utterly devastating news that was. “Still, I suppose we knew part of that from the admiral and her own expedition north from Cape Verde. Is there anything else?”
“The captain’s name is Flora Fielding,” Jay said. “But she’s only been captain since they left Ascension. She was on the Courageous before that. And this ship’s called the Ocean Queen. At least for now. The kids are talking about changing the name.”
“Of course they are.”
“Oh, and there’s one other thing. It’s sort of good news, I think. They sailed past Calais, and were going to venture into the harbour because it was the least damaged one they’d seen for days. Thing is, they spotted a mine floating in the water.”
“A mine?”
“Yeah, you know, to sink ships. That’s why they kept going. They stopped here because they were almost out of fuel and this was the best place to come ashore that they could find. They took the diesel from the Courageous, and headed for Ukraine. Most of them. Captain Fielding stayed behind. Her and three crew.”
“Was one of them called Healy?” she asked.
“It doesn’t say,” Jay said.
“Well, I think we can guess what happened to them. They went north to see whether they could find fuel, but died in Zeebrugge. There are mines in Calais?”
“Yeah, see, that’s what I mean. Sort of good news, right, because if we’d sailed there, we might have blown ourselves up.”
“That’s stretching the definition of good to breaking point,” Nilda said.
“But we found our ship,” Jay said.
“We did,” she said.
“Thing is, though, Mum, what about Chester? We’re going to look for him now, right?”
“Right now, I’m going to see if there’s enough warmed up snowmelt to wash, and then I’m going to eat. You keep reading that log. Start with the bit about Monrovia. If they found no fuel north of there, does that mean there’s fuel in Liberia? And does it mean there’s fuel south of there? Keep reading, Jay.” She stood, and walked away before he realised that she’d not answered his question.
As everyone else moved chairs and tables together, Nilda, Tuck, and Aisha gathered in a corner of the lounge. Nilda placed the electric lamp on the table.
“What a day,” Aisha said. “What a couple of days. I honestly do not wish to go through that again.”
“And I hope we won’t,” Nilda said. “Tuck, how safe are we really?”
“Zombies can’t climb ladders, and that’s what most of the stairs are.”
“Kevin said he found a proper staircase in the corridor beyond those doors,” Aisha said.
“It’s sealed,” Tuck signed. “If we keep the doors to this lounge closed tonight, we’re safe.”
“It means no more of Kevin’s fires,” Nilda said, “but they were giving off too much smoke.”
“But once we get the engines running, we’ll have heat, won’t we?” Aisha asked. “It’s not just for us, it’s the seedlings we brought from the Tower. Half are dead.”
“We’ll have to look for seeds growing wild when spring comes,” Nilda said. “Did you find the galley?”
“Which one?” Tuck signed. “There’s a kitchen behind the bar, and a larger one on the other side of the ballroom. I don’t think much food was prepared there.”
“They’d have a main kitchen below decks,” Aisha said. “Most meals are prepared centrally, then brought up to wherever they’re being served. The smaller kitchens were more for presentation than preparation.”
“You’ve been on a cruise?” Nilda asked.
“My parents. When my mother retired,” Aisha said. “But this is nice. One large ship for us all. It’s not quite what I was expecting.”
“It’ll be better this way,” Nilda said.
“For the admiral,” Aisha said. “Not for us.”
Tuck leaned forward out of the shadows. “We knew we had to leave the Tower, to join forces with Anglesey. We talked about it.”
“Before we knew about the horde, we hoped to get a few people to join us,” Aisha said.
“Wishes and hopes have taken us as far as they can,” Nilda said. “And they brought us here. Dundalk and Elysium aren’t Anglesey. They’re barely holding on by the skin of their teeth. With everyone aboard a ship like this, there’ll be no chance for mutiny, for people disappearing with half the supplies. It’ll mean no sabotage since that’d doom the saboteurs as well.”
“From what we heard about Belfast, about that cult in Anglesey, do you think they care about their own lives?” Aisha said. “Can we really hope for rational behaviour?”
“I don’t know about hope,” Nilda said. “But what can we do? We can’t change reality. The admiral wanted a ship, and we’ve found it. These lights are proof that the engines almost certainly work. The New World will arrive tomorrow. And there’s absolutely no reason that this ship shouldn’t depart as soon as it has enough fuel to reach Ireland.”
“And the HMS Courageous?” Tuck signed.
“We’ll search it tomorrow,” Nilda said. “Rather, Norm and Leon can. And you and I will go back into the town, weather allowing. That said, I can’t imagine a single thing we might find that will change the facts. This isn’t our ship, it’s the admiral’s. The New World is Mary O’Leary’s. We might be asked our opinions, but only out of courtesy. It’s frustrating, but it’s reality.”
“We could take the Courageous,” Tuck signed.
“If there’s diesel still aboard, we should take that,” Nilda said. “But we can’t take the ship. And where would we take it? To follow this cruise ship back to Ireland? It would be a waste of diesel. Where would we get any more? Better to use that fuel, if there is any, in the smaller boats. We’ll need them out fishing all day, every day, just to give us a chance. And then there are the children. It’s always been about them. Ever since the Tower. Since McInery’s death, we’ve been struggling. It was only Quigley’s supplies that kept us alive. Now we’ve lost those. I don’t think we can keep the children alive on our own.”
“And Chester?” Tuck signed.
“I don’t know,” Nilda said. “All I know is that the cruise ship will depart, and head for Ireland, making for either Elysium or Dundalk, depending on which is closer to collapse. I suppose it’ll take a couple of days to board all the people from each place, a couple more to sail around Ireland. Within a couple of weeks, this ship will be full.”
“And then what?” Aisha said. “Or I suppose I mean where, and there’s only one answer. The ship will go to America.”
“Yes, I think so,” Nilda said. “North toward Svalbard to rendezvous with the Amundsen to refuel again, then on to Newfoundland. And after that, the United States. We’ll move from one sheltered bay to another until we find warmer weather or a safe harbour.”
“That’s what the admiral said?” Tuck signed.
“No. Not exactly,” Nilda said. “She said that was one option, but there were people listening in to the call. She might have some other plan. No, let me rephrase that, she might have had some other plan, but what Jay found in the captain’s log changes that. This ship sailed up the west coast of Africa. There might be an intact port south of Liberia, but nothing north. Nothing that offered better prospects than a seven-month-old radio broadcast of a rumour there were survivors in Ukraine. This side of the Atlantic is dead. It’s over. We don’t know if America will be any better, but it really can’t be worse.”
“Then you’ve decided?” Aisha asked.
“I think so,” Nilda said. “We have to stick together, and the children have to come first. I’d like to look for Chester, but even if I stay, alone, I risk Jay coming looking for me in a month or year. I hate the choice, but it’s a choice that we made during our darkest times, just after Chester had been shot. When I thought he was dying, when I thought all was lost, when we thought we were all about to die. But this is far from as bleak as that. We’ll leave messages for Chester in Elysium. Maybe Scott will find another plane.”
“Then we’re leaving with this ship,” Aisha said.
“Not necessarily. There’s still the question of what happened to the people who were on this ship, and there is a chance that there’s a group alive in Ukraine. The satellites will tell us, I hope. It’ll take the best part of two weeks to board everyone from Elysium and Dundalk. I’m going to suggest we join The New World, and stay here until the satellites have shown us there is nothing to the east but snow a
nd the undead. But when the admiral is ready to cross the Atlantic, we have to be ready to join her.”
Part Three
The Journey Home
Day 257
25th November
(The day on which the Tower of London is finally abandoned)
Chapter 14 - The Road to Amiens
Northern France
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Chester Carson muttered.
“What’s that?” Bill Wright asked without taking his hands from wheel or his eyes from the railway line along which their all-terrain vehicle jolted and bounced.
“Oh, I was just thinking about that radio set we found in the church’s bell-tower,” Chester said. “More specifically, I was thinking about Nilda and my family at the Tower of London, and our attempt to build a radio transmitter earlier in the summer. I read up a fair bit on radios. Can’t say I understood it all. It’s amazing how you can live your life surrounded by technology and be utterly oblivious to how most of it works.”
“Zombie,” Sorcha Locke said from the navigator seat. “Directly ahead.”
“Seen it,” Bill said. “Hold on.”
As the ATV rumbled onwards, the engine’s laborious drone masked the dull crack of breaking sleepers, and the higher pitched grind as rails were dislodged by the heavy tank treads. Chester leaned forward, squinting at the reinforced windscreen. Even without the gore and mud smeared across the heavy glass, he would have had difficulty spotting the creature. His eyesight had never recovered from the bullet that had grazed the side of his head. He’d found a pair of glasses in an abandoned optician’s after they’d helped liberate the island-town refuge of Creil. His brow furrowed. That was only yesterday, and it was only this morning that he’d lost the spectacles during the frantic rescue mission at Adrianna’s watchtower.
Ahead, the shadows and blurs resolved into a three-limbed figure just before the creature stumbled over a sleeper, fell, and was lost to sight. The crunch of bones being crushed was lost to hearing beneath the heavy engine’s grinding roar.
“I can see two more,” Locke said. “Down in the field, ahead to the right. Wait, three more to the left of the railway. Don’t think they’re a threat. Hang on.” She climbed up into the turret, took a quick three-sixty, and dropped back inside. “Zombies behind, heading towards us across a field. A lot of them.”
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 15): Where There's Hope Page 13
