Tuck stalked towards the last of the undead, swinging the axe up over her head, and then down, cleaving its head from temple to nose. She checked their surroundings, then her newfound watch. Forty seconds. Too slow.
“Okay?” she signed. Jay nodded. She raised two fingers, then pointed towards the north. Jay nodded again, but not in recognition. Tuck ran over to him, grabbed him by the shoulder, and hustled him to an alleyway and the lee of a parked car.
“You did good,” she signed, but he wasn’t looking at her hands. She met his eyes, waiting until she saw him focus. He relaxed. Then she did too.
His gloves were covered in blood. It wasn’t all blood, she knew, but it was best to think of it that way. She removed hers and made him do the same. She met his eyes again, then pointed back towards the apartment block. He nodded slowly, and she loaded the crossbow.
Now came the difficult part. If the undead at the front of the building heard the noise, would they come and investigate? They’d told Stewart that they were going to the boat and would be back in a few hours with the food. He’d seemed confused at first, almost as if he’d not known about the supplies. But then he’d nodded and seemed happy, muttering something about always needing to know where the next meal is coming from. What she hadn’t said was that there was a good chance they weren’t going to come back.
It wasn’t that she wanted to leave Stewart behind. He was a strange man, but he seemed harmless enough. Seeing his friends killed – or murdered if his disjointed account was to be believed – had broken a psyche already fractured by all he’d witnessed since the evacuation.
If the undead heard them and came from the building’s front to block the back door, then Stewart would be on his own. Jay’s life came first. The boy was too important to her. They made a good team, and she’d grown to rely on him, but there was something else. He was a symbol that everything she had been through before the outbreak, and everything since, had a purpose.
It was for that reason she’d not wasted any of the crossbow’s bolts on leaving the building. And for that same reason, she had spent most of the previous day practicing with it in the long corridor outside the apartment.
They waited, Tuck glancing between Jay and the back of the building. Fifty seconds after they had taken cover, Jay tapped on her arm, hearing the approaching undead before she saw them. He pointed towards the side of the building.
Four seconds after that, a zombie appeared. She recognised the tattered remains of a fur-trimmed hat as belonging to one of those who’d been at the side of the building. She waited. Another creature followed, this one wearing a thick sweatshirt with brown stains that were barely visible against the dark red dye. That was the second living corpse that had been lurking around the side of the building.
Still she waited. The creature in the hat moved out across the building’s rear, indifferent to the zombies now lying truly dead near the door. She took aim, waiting for the right moment. The creature stopped and tilted its head, almost as if it was listening. She fired. The bolt sailed through the air, punching through one of the hat’s flaps, pinning it to the zombie’s head as it collapsed. She reloaded, her eyes fixed on the other creature. It was moving, more quickly now, towards the fallen zombie. It stopped a few feet away, arms moving left and right, out of sync with its bobbing head; left and right, left and right, left and… as it looked her way, she fired. The bolt sliced through its eye and into its brain. They waited a full five minutes, but there were no more.
She nodded to Jay and they ran softly back across the road towards the apartment block. Whilst she cut the two precious bolts free, he went back inside, coming out with two suitcases. One under each arm, he carried them to their hiding place behind the car. Then he went back for two more. When she had the bolts free, she went back inside and grabbed a pair of suitcases herself. They’d gathered sixteen in total, just inside the door. She didn’t remember the exact quantity of supplies in the boat, but each suitcase would take one fuel can, with the space between filled with ration packs.
Leaving the suitcases behind the car, they scouted a route back to the boat. It was less than a hundred metres from the apartment, the river visible from most of the top floor windows, but it still took them close to an hour. They went slowly, hugging the walls, placing each foot softly as Jay listened, and she stood ready with the bow.
On their way to the river, she fired off three bolts, killing two of the undead. Jay heard the first just before they were turned a corner. He misjudged the distance, signing it was a lot further down the street than it actually was. That was an easy shot, but perhaps because of his mistake, when he heard the wheezing growl of the second creature, he underestimated the distance. Expecting it to be nearer, she missed. The bolt flittered past its face, skittering along the road to disappear into a storm drain. She was still cursing the loss of one of their precious few bolts as she reloaded and fired again.
And whether it was the noise of the bolt, the wheeze of the zombie, or something else, before the creature hit the ground, another tumbled out of a doorway to her left. There was no time to reload, she dropped the bow, reaching for her axe, but Jay was already running forward, crowbar out, ducking under its out-flung arms as he punched the sharpened end into its brain. Think of the future, she told herself as she retrieved the bolt. Don’t think of him as a child soldier. Don’t remember the past. The last two streets were empty of the undead, so too was the riverbank near the boat.
“Now we’ve just got to get that stuff out of there,” Jay signed.
“Small steps,” she reminded him. “We get the suitcases here. Then we fill them up. Then we move them. And it takes as long as it takes. We don’t hurry.” Because speed meant noise. Nor were they taking the cases back to the apartment. She’d already decided they were going to leave there as soon as they could. With the fuel, she’d also decided they wouldn’t be on foot for much longer.
25
th
July - nr Teddington Lock
It had taken them an hour to move the empty suitcases, and the rest of the day to fill them up. It would have been quicker had they managed to do it quietly.
They’d lost one crossbow bolt to a zombie that had toppled into the Thames, another had broken on impact, and cutting the others out of necrotic flesh added further delays. Then they had run out of suitcases. That, at least, was a setback Tuck didn’t mind. In the end it had taken a day and a half to move all the supplies to the film studio. It wasn’t an ideal spot, but it was less likely that anyone would stumble across the food and fuel there than at one of the pubs or houses overlooking the river.
There was a pair of large vans in the studio car park. They found the keys in an office. With Jay standing sentry on the roof, and a cup-full of petrol added to the tanks, she’d risked turning them over. They started.
After they discovered that the supplies weren’t his, they hadn’t told Stewart where they had hidden them. He seemed to think that both the boat and its contents belonged to the same group that had shot him. It was hard getting reliable information out of him, for he seemed to drift between fevered delirium and fear-borne madness.
Reassured they had a vehicle, fuel and food, all that was left was choosing a destination.
“Which is better?” Jay asked, holding up two boxes, “Lawrence of Arabia or Gandhi?”
“That’s a difficult one,” she signed back. “Can’t you watch both?”
“Don’t think so. The battery will only last for three hours.”
He’d gone through the apartments gathering all the laptops he could find, checking each for power. Most hadn’t had much, and he’d squandered most of what was left on some American police sitcom. Now he was down to his last powered laptop, and the clearly agonizing decision of which film should be his last one to watch.
“Your call,” she signed. “Bring the other one with us. We’ll find another laptop somewhere.”
He nodded, then put the boxes down.
“Or,” she added, in the hope it would cheer him up, “since we have the fuel, perhaps we could find a portable generator. You could charge up the laptop, and we could have a cooked meal.”
“Isn’t that a bit wasteful?”
“We’d just use a litre or two. I think we deserve a bit of a treat, don’t you? The next part of the journey is going to be a tough one.”
“We’re still going to Westminster, aren’t we?” he asked.
She nodded.
“But we won’t stay there?”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to. There may be too many undead for us to linger.”
“And then where do we go? We need to know. I mean, we should leave a note for Mum saying where we’ll go. I… I know we probably won’t find her, it’s just, we’ve come all this way, it would be a waste if we didn’t at least leave a note.”
“I was thinking of the Mediterranean,” she signed. “Gibraltar perhaps. Or Cyprus.” Somewhere she might find an old comrade or two, and which was far from Northumberland.
“Where?” Jay asked, clearly not understanding.
“Europe. South. Where the winter’s will be warm.”
“And do we have enough fuel to get there?”
“No, but we can find more. First we need a boat and a clear stretch of water. Then we need to get the supplies to it.”
“First, we need Stewart to get better,” Jay replied. “What do you think is wrong with him?”
“Probably an infection,” Tuck signed.
“You mean he’s going to turn?” Jay asked.
Tuck shook her head. She understood his confusion; they’d only used that word to refer to the virus that turned the living into the undead. “The wound on his hand isn’t clean.”
“Oh,” Jay said, dawning comprehension bringing relief to his face. “So what do we do?”
“He needs antibiotics. Medicine,” Tuck signed. “And we haven’t got any. All we can do is wait. Maybe he’ll recover.” He probably wouldn’t.
“We could look for some.”
“Where? The hospitals were emptied out.”
“The vets’ weren’t,” Jay said. “I mean, the ones we went in had medicines and stuff still on the shelves. And what works on a dog should work on a person, shouldn’t it?”
“It probably can’t make it worse,” she signed.
Frustration was bubbling up again as Jay opened the fire escape. Tuck levelled the crossbow and fired a bolt into the creature loitering by the bottom step. Going outside wasn’t as simple as walking down the stairs. They had to go up to the roof, check the perimeter, and do so quietly. They’d only seen one zombie outside, but it still meant nearly an hour wasted before they closed the door behind them.
It was half an hour before they spotted a car with a ‘bark if you like dogs’ sticker on the back, then checked the houses until they found one with a small grave in the garden. Inside was the familiar evidence of packing before the evacuation. Tuck wondered about that as she looked at the photograph of the couple with their pet. It was some sort of poodle crossbreed, just too large to fit happily into a bag. At least, Tuck thought, it looked pretty miserable in the photograph, and the man carrying the bag seemed to be struggling under the weight.
The couple had killed the dog because pets were definitely not allowed on the evacuation. It said a lot about the couple that they didn’t just let the animal go and fend for itself. Probably it would have died, she thought, but it might not have. And in the end, no doubt that couple had faced a similar death, euthanized by the government at some evacuation point.
“Here.” Jay held an open address book in front of her. It was open to ‘V’, and there, just as she’d hoped, was an address for a vet. According to the A-Z it was only a few streets away, close to the railway station.
“It wasn’t looted,” Jay said, looking at the empty shelves and cabinets. “This was methodical.”
Most of the medication was gone. The active ingredients in those left behind had a short half-life, and would have lost their efficacy soon after the evacuation. She picked up a bottle and checked the expiry date. The end of April. That was interesting but not at all helpful. On the reception desk, she noted that there were no photographs. There had been none in the office either. Taken with the locked door, it was clear that the place had been emptied by the staff. In a drawer, she found a printed leaflet, listing other surgeries nearby.
“We’ll try these,” she signed. “They’re not too far.”
“And if we can’t find anything?” Jay asked.
“Then it’s down to Stewart. And if he dies, at least he’s dying in a comfortable bed.”
The next surgery, a quarter mile away, had burned down along with the shops next to it. Tuck couldn’t tell if it was arson or an accident and didn’t linger long enough to find out. They tried the next, and this one was looted. The windows had been smashed, the doors forced. Tuck looked at the list, checked it against the map, and headed towards a third surgery. They were travelling northeast, towards Westminster. She’d not said as much to Jay, though she suspected he might have noticed. How easy would it be for them to get there, that was the question. Five hours later, still empty handed, and only four miles from the apartment, she realised it wasn’t going to be easy at all.