Leaving the knife where it was, she looked around, but they seemed to be alone. She knew what false security that was. A brief tug was all she needed to confirm the bolt in the creature’s chest was stuck fast. With Jay already clambering across the wreckage of the cruiser, there wasn’t time to cut it free. She ran after him, jumping over the gap between the bank and the boat, her landing softened by the waist-deep water. Metal creaked as the cruiser shifted and sank a few inches. She waded across as Jay bodily heaved the man up from the deck of the second boat. He tried to carry him across to the cruiser, but the weight was too much for him. Tuck climbed on board. She saw bandages on the man’s hand and his shoulder, and she remembered how he’d been running.
“Wait!” she signed. The bandage on the man’s shoulder had shifted as Jay had tried to lift him. She peeled it back a little further and recognised the type of wound instantly. The man had been shot. How and why and by whom were questions that could wait, they had to. Three undead staggered along the riverbank from the direction of the studio. She looked around the boat, perhaps they could get the engine working—
She stopped. Everything, from the injured man to the approaching undead, was forgotten. The boat was full of fuel cans and boxes. Inside a partially open one she saw packs of military rations. There had to be months of supplies there. She grabbed a rope and threw it to Jay, and pointed at the railing running the length of the wrecked cruiser. If there was fuel, the engine might work. And if it did, then what? They could go west, upriver, but to where? She eyed the approaching undead. No, the best thing to do was get away, find somewhere safe and come back later for the supplies. She grabbed a medical kit, one lying half open on the deck next to a bloody smear, and a fistful of ration packs, stuffing them into her bag. Find somewhere close, she thought. The zombies were three hundred metres away, with four more a hundred metres behind. It was time to go. Together, they hauled the injured man across the boat and onto the bank. There were nine undead now. Or was it ten? It didn’t matter.
“We need somewhere close,” she signed, then heaved the injured man up and over her shoulders. She began to run.
The man was heavy. Too heavy. She’d tried to keep fit since her discharge, but gyms and swimming pools and anywhere else that was public were very definitely out. She’d taken to climbing the fence around a local university and running its track in the middle of the night. That wasn’t enough preparation for carrying the too-close-to-dead weight of the injured man. Find somewhere nearby, she told herself, trying to think of something other than the burning in her limbs. Somewhere with more than one exit. Not the studio, it was in the direction the undead were coming from. Carrying the man for much longer wasn’t an option either. There. The apartment building. Tall, big. It would have more than one entrance. The windows appeared intact, but she knew appearances were almost always deceptive. There was no other choice. Five zombies stumbled out of an alley ahead of them. If they stopped to fight, the man would die. They had to find shelter. When Jay next glanced at her, she pointed at the apartment and its bottle-green double doors with their artfully spaced porthole windows. Jay understood. He sprinted past, pulling out his crowbar as he ran. She hoped the doors were made of wood. She hoped he’d check to see if they were open. She hoped she’d be able to carry the man the last ten metres.
Jay pulled at the handles. The doors were locked. He stuck the crowbar in and heaved. They broke. He pushed the door open and Tuck ran in, dropping the unconscious man onto the grimy floor. There was little light in the atrium, but just enough to see a reception area, the two corridors leading off at ninety degrees, and the stairwell leading up.
Jay shoved the door closed, but the lock was now useless. Through the distorted lens of the porthole window, Tuck saw the five undead getting closer. There was a sofa against the wall. With Jay at one end and her on the other, they dragged it in front of the door. The thing looked brutally uncomfortable, but it was heavy, and heavy enough that when the first of the undead thumped into the wooden doors, they stayed closed. They added a lamp and a table to the barricade, but it still wasn’t enough. She signalled to Jay and pointed to the first door off the lobby. He laid an ear against it and listened. The front doors shook again, and Jay placed a hand over his other ear.
“Clear,” he signed, and began to work at the lock with the crowbar. There wasn’t time. Tuck pushed him out of the way, raised her foot and kicked at the door. On the second blow, the wood split. One more kick and the lock broke. The door swung open. A cursory check found the apartment was empty. Running the length of the hallway was a metre-high free-standing bookcase. She toppled it to one side, spilling the books out onto the floor, then started dragging it through the doorway. Jay grabbed hold, and together they heaved and hauled it back to the atrium.
Another chair, a small cabinet, and anything else they could easily lift, joined the hasty barricade. Finally, with the porthole windows now completely obscured, she was satisfied the doors would hold.
With the only illumination coming fourth hand from the open apartment door, Tuck grabbed Jay’s arm, motioned towards the injured man, and then to the staircase. Jay in front, they went up. She tried to be silent. It was difficult. It was always difficult, not being able to hear how heavy her footsteps were. That was something she’d had to learn anew since leaving hospital, and something right now that was made doubly difficult under the weight of the injured man. Jay paused at the first landing. She shook her head, motioning him to keep going until they reached the third floor. She waved her free hand vaguely at the nearest door. Jay went to check.
“It’s clear,” he signed, and before she could tell him to wait, he’d levered the door open and was running into the apartment. Her heart in her mouth, she followed, dumping the injured man unceremoniously on a couch before checking the side rooms. The apartment was empty.
“Don’t!” she barked, her damaged vocal chords burning with the utterance of the simple word. “Don’t do that again!” she signed. “Wait.”
“Sorry.”
She relented. “Check the other doors on this floor,” she signed. “But just listen. Don’t go in. Okay? Then check the stairwell, and come back here. Quickly!”
Contrite, Jay complied.
Blood was seeping through the injured man’s bandages. Tuck took out the medical kit she’d found in the boat and rebandaged the shoulder. The bullet had gone through, but she thought it might have broken the bone. If the man lived, that might be a problem. If. She turned to his hand and took a step back the moment she saw the wound. There was no mistaking it. The man’s thumb had been bitten off. She checked his pulse. It was weak but steady.
Could the man be immune like Jay? That first night after their escape came back to her. Jay wouldn’t stop crying, and she couldn’t understand why until he’d raised his shirt to show a bloody wound where undead teeth had scraped the skin from his side. But dawn had come, and Jay had still been alive. This man could be the same.
She wished she’d asked Bran whether he’d come across anyone else who had survived after being bitten. She’d considered it, right up until he’d told her about Northumberland and Anglesey and their little war. If Jay alone out of all the world’s survivors was immune, then he would be a prize for either of those rump states. But perhaps he wasn’t the only one.
Then there was the bullet wound. That posed just as many questions, and ones that were more immediately pressing. After being shot the man couldn’t have run far. A few miles at most. That meant there were people with guns in London. More than that, there were people with guns who were prepared to use them on others. She thought again of those men at the bungalow as she finished bandaging his hand. It was just one more problem to be dealt with if the man regained consciousness. If.
“No zombies on this floor,” Jay said when he returned. “There’s a stairwell at either end of this corridor. I don’t know about the one above or below.”
Tuck nodded. They would need to check. More importantly, they would need to ensure they had an escape route. She looked back to the injured man. Hurriedly, she ripped up a sheet, twisted it into a rough rope, and tied one of his legs to a coffee table.
They blocked off the stairwell that led to the reception desk with mattresses taken from the rooms nearest it. On top, Tuck balanced a tray of cutlery. If they got in, the undead would eventually claw their way through the mattresses, but if they did that, the sound of all those knives and forks clattering down the stairs should alert Jay in enough time that they would be able to escape through the fire exit. They found that on the side of the building furthest from the river.
Feeling that the immediate danger had now passed, they went slowly through the building, Jay listening at each door for any sound of movement from inside. There were only two ‘occupied’ apartments. They marked the doors of those, leaving the zombies to be dealt with later. Finally they went up to the roof.
When they stepped out into the fresh air and she saw the streets below, Tuck breathed a sigh of relief. There were thirty undead outside the front door, but only three at the back. And whilst there were many more on the side roads and streets surrounding the apartment building, all seemed to be heading to the north. For now, if not safe, they were at least secure.
21
st
July - nr Teddington Lock
London
Tuck opened her eyes and checked her watch. The face was cracked, both hands stuck at seven. She guessed it was around five a.m. perhaps a little earlier. She’d slept in a chair by the balcony doors, the curtains drawn, and been woken when the first light of dawn pierced through those rare gaps between buildings in the crowded suburb. She always slept in a chair and rarely slept for more than a few hours at a time.
She took off the watch and laid it down on the table. She would have to find a new one. It didn’t matter; she’d only had the newly broken watch for two weeks, and that had been a replacement for another that had lasted four days. Watches broke as regularly as weapons become stuck in the bodies of the undead. Clothes were discarded rather than cleaned. Half-read books, too heavy to carry, were left behind in the hope that another copy would be found at some future night’s refuge. Since memories couldn’t be eaten, keepsakes, and mementos had long since been discarded. Her boots were the only thing she’d owned before the outbreak.
There had been a watch she’d been attached to, once, but with whatever the opposite of sentiment was. She’d dropped it into the river on her visit to stay with the Major. It hadn’t been a particularly expensive watch, just a cheap digital whose only appealing feature had been that it kept the time. A nurse had given it to her in hospital when she’d woken up to find herself in a silent world, swaddled in bandages, and coddled by morphine. It was days before she really understood the extent of the damage the IED had caused. Or perhaps it had been hours. It was that uncertainty which had made her ask for a watch the moment a pen was placed in her hand.
In those months, everything was done according to a schedule. She would stare at the display, seeing the seconds roll into minutes, waiting for the time she would be bathed, the time to eat, the time that the lights would be dimmed, and she was expected to sleep. Then there had been the routine of recovery, of learning to speak with her hands and listen by reading lips, all in between more operations. During those months, time had been something to wish away. The journey wasn’t to be thought about, just the destination, the time after the long years of recovery and successive bouts of reconstructive surgery when she would be able to hear again.
She was meant to be in surgery now, she realised. The surgeon had scheduled it for the third week in June. He’d told her that it was timed so she wouldn’t be starting recovery during the height of summer. One of the nurses had said it was because he’d booked a three-week holiday in the Caribbean. She didn’t mind. All she’d cared about was getting past the final set of operations, the ones at the beginning of December. The doctor had said she’d be singing carols at Christmas. She’d let herself believe him, despite his insistence that she keep learning sign language.
She was lucky in a way that the Major hadn’t been. She was deaf and could barely talk. The skin on the back of her neck and face felt like it was forever being pulled taut, but she was alive. The Major wasn’t. She knew it. She just didn’t know if he was properly dead.
He had arrived at the hospital six weeks after her. Night after night, when she couldn’t sleep, she had sat watching him through the glass of his room. She was still a patient when he walked, with help, out of the front gates just weeks after the surgery that had given him a new kidney.
He had visited her, and later, she had visited him at his house near Kew. It was at Christmas that she had received the email from him, the one saying the kidney had had to be removed. In February, when the undead rose, he was on dialysis, still waiting for a new one.
Not wishing to be a burden, she was sure he wouldn’t have joined the evacuation but would have stayed at home. She was equally sure he wouldn’t have taken his own life, and now she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that he might be there still, but undead.
She stood up, trying to shake away those dismal thoughts that always came at this time of day. Jay lay on the room’s small sofa. She moved quietly; he’d learned to wake at any small sound.