“A few days ago, we rescued this guy,” Jay explained. “He was shot, but made it across the river. He’s got a fever. We’re looking for antibiotics. In the vets’ surgeries.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have had much luck around here. The few that hadn’t been looted, we stripped clean. But I’m sure we can spare some. Where is he?”
“By the river, near Teddington.”
Mathias grimaced. “That’s got to be at least ten miles. Can he walk?”
“He can barely stand. He was unconscious when we left this morning,” Jay said. He looked over at Tuck, then added, “And whether you can help us or not, we’ll have to go back to him soon.”
“If we don’t help one another, then what’s the point?” Dev asked, solemnly.
“Then you better come back with us,” Mathias said. “It’s not far, we’ll get you the antibiotics and…” he glanced at the younger man, “… well, we’ll see.”
Dev and Mathias were well practiced at travelling through London. They darted through side streets, across parks, and within a few minutes had reached a part of the city they were clearly more familiar with. They ran to a door of an elegant mansion that at first seemed identical to all the others. As she reached it, Tuck saw that there was a swatch of red cloth nailed to the frame, and two lengths of red string across the door; the first a foot above the ground, the second at a height of five feet.
“Ask him if it marks off their territory,” Tuck signed, still wary of these two.
“No. Not really. Red cloth tells us our route,” Dev explained. “And if the string gets broken, then we know the undead are inside.”
She expected to find the house full of people, but it was empty. There was a hole in the fence of the back garden that led to a small courtyard. The street entrance to that was blocked off, but there was a gap in another fence which led to another garden and another house. There they waited, watching from the ground floor window, as a trio of undead drifted by on the road heading south.
“Now!” Mathias hissed. They ran out of the door, across the road, through an empty shop, across a yard, and into the grounds of church, and on. Tuck was trying to memorise the route, her eyes searching for the lengths of red string and strips of red cloth, when Mathias abruptly stopped in an alley. Against the side wall of a restaurant was a scaffolding ladder, though the building had no other signs of work being done.
“Now we go up,” Mathias said.
Tuck pointed for Jay to go first as she looked up and down the alley trying to get her bearings. She gave up. She’d only visited London a few times before the outbreak, and no amount of staring at maps had prepared her for the warren of side streets and alleys. They were somewhere between Kensington and Soho. More precisely than that, she couldn’t say. Then it was her turn. She climbed.
From the roof, London opened up before her. She could see the Shard jutting up above the rooftops across the river to the southwest, and the cluster of oddly-shaped towers, all with their culinary nicknames, to the northwest. She looked for the landmarks she was more familiar with, St Paul’s, The Monument, The Eye, Big Ben, but couldn’t find them.
Jay was tugging at her sleeve.
“Can you believe this?” he signed, wide-eyed and… it took her a moment to understand the emotion. She’d never seen him wear that expression before, but he was genuinely excited. She knew well enough that
everyone
dreamed of coming to London, but it didn’t deserve this level of near jubilant glee. Then she saw the true cause of his excitement. There was a walkway linking this building with the next, and on the far side of that building she could see another. At two-feet wide, and sometimes less, made of planks laid on top of lengths of bolted-together scaffolding, it was one of the most impressive sights she’d seen.
“Ask them where the walkways lead,” she signed.
“This is as far as we go to the west,” Mathias explained. “We ran out of scaffolding, and we only came this far because Mac knew this part of London. You see over there?” He pointed to a building one block to the south. “That’s the British Expeditionary Association. That was our target. The professor remembered a piece on the radio a few years ago, about how they sent care packages to what was called the far flung corners of the Empire.” He stopped, seeing Jay’s confusion.
“It was a private club. You know what they are?” Mathias asked. “You go to the right kind of school, pay some exorbitant fee, and you get access to a log fire, a bar, and cheap accommodation in central London. This one sent marmite, marmalade, and a myriad other typically English comestibles to its overseas members each year. We hoped those hampers were still there.”
“And they weren’t?” Jay asked.
“Not really, they sent them out at Christmas. That was the part of the programme that the professor had forgotten. There were twenty-five hampers still there, and that was good, sure, but not worth the effort on its own. Even after you add in the supplies from the vets’ around here, and the places that Mrs McInery knew, it was a lot of work for not quite enough reward. Here, you see this?” He’d stopped at the roof’s edge and pointed at the cement fixing the edge of the walkway to the roof.
“Quick drying, but you’ve still got to wait a day before you can move anything of any weight over these. And you’ve got to carry the cement and the scaffolding from a building site up onto the roofs and then across London. Every day we’re doing that is a day we’re not looking to the future. Come on.” He started across the roof to the next walkway. “The problem,” he went on, “is time. For all I know the building below us is the London headquarters for some new bottled water distributor. In the basement could be gallons of the stuff. We won’t know until we look, but it would take us a day to do it safely and we may find nothing. Or maybe it’s that building over there.” He pointed across a road, one that didn’t have a walkway across it. “To build a bridge to it would take an extra day, so if we found nothing, that’s two days wasted. And if we want to reuse the scaffolding, another day to break the cement and move the materials back. These days, our route’s determined by where there’s a construction site. The only reason we came out this way was because Mrs McInery knew the area. She had a house down that way, near where a hotel was being built. Without that, the club would have been left alone. Here, look down there. That street was full of the undead when we built the walkway. And now they’re gone. Not sure why. They come. They go. And we stay.”
Tuck dropped to the back of the group and out of the conversation. She thought she had enough information. She’d judge the rest when she saw it.
When they reached the roof of a university building on the far side of Oxford Street, Mathias stopped and pointed at a glass and steel building jutting incongruously up above a string of Georgian mansions. “That’s us,” he said. “Kirkman House. You can see the transmitter.”
Tuck nodded and glanced at the building. A pane of glass had been removed from the fifth floor, and a bridge built across a narrow alley onto the flat roof of a Georgian Terrace, itself connected by a longer bridge to the roof she stood on. Whilst it was quite a sight, she was more interested in the pot plants on the building’s flat roof. On second inspection, she realised the plants were far from decorative.
There were green tomatoes, withered peppers, and a cornucopia of other unripe, unwatered fruit and vegetables.
“Hana, Mac!” Mathias waved to two women, partially hidden by the foliage. They’d been moving bags of cement from the end of one walkway to another and seemed grateful for an excuse to rest.
“You found some more survivors,” the older of the two women said, “but where’s Myra?”
“She died,” Mathias said. “Bitten. These two saved us.”
“That’s… that’s terrible,” the younger woman, Hana said.
“It’s the way of the world,” McInery said.
“They’ve a friend,” Mathias said. “He’s sick.”
Jay summarised Stewart’s situation.
“Well, no wonder you didn’t find any antibiotics down there. I emptied those surgeries during… gosh, it must have been April. My name’s Hana, hello. This is Mrs McInery.” The older woman gave a thin, empty smile. “I was a vet,” Hana went on. “But these days it’s the humans that need more care than the animals.”
Animals? Tuck looked at Jay, but he didn’t seem phased by the revelation. She assumed that Dev must have told him.
“I can give you a broad spectrum antibiotic,” Hana continued.
“Ask her if she can come and examine him,” Tuck signed.
“No. I’m sorry,” McInery said. “That’s impossible.”
“Ordinarily I would,” Hana added. “But we’ve two sick pigs. Gosh, that sounds callous, I don’t mean it to be.” And Tuck wondered if she’d ever known anyone who’d actually said ‘gosh’ before. “But there’s not much I can do, not without our equipment. Can you bring him here?”
Jay looked at Tuck, “Can we?” he asked.
“Maybe. Ask her if she’d help him if we did.”
Half way through Jay’s translation, McInery opened her mouth in what Tuck was sure would be a protest, but it was Mathias who answered.
“Of course, we will. If you can get him here.”
“I’ll get the antibiotics,” Hana said. “Do you need anything else? Food? Water? No? I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She headed across the walkway towards Kirkman House. McInery stared at Tuck with a discomfortingly knowing expression, then shrugged and picked up the sack she’d been carrying before her labour had been interrupted. Awkwardly, slowly, she hefted the sack across the roof towards the small pile next to the other walkway.
Tuck walked over to the large pile, grabbed a sack, and with far more ease than the older woman, carried it over to the roof’s far side. Jay copied her, and Dev joined in a moment later. Mathias, Tuck noted with interest, didn’t help. He just stood near the walkway, a sad smile on his lips.
Tuck had shifted three bags when Hana returned with a large bag containing the antibiotics and a score of other medical supplies.
“Thank you,” she mouthed slowly as she handed the bag over. “Thank you for helping them.”
Tuck nodded, feeling oddly awkward and embarrassed, and was glad when, with Mathias leading the way, they were walking back across the rooftops towards the restaurant and the ladder where he finally bid them farewell.
“The undead come and go,” he said. “The streets around here are clear for now. In a week it might be different. If you want to join us, come soon. If not, good luck.” He held out his hand. She took it, and then, carefully, cautiously, she and Jay headed back to Stewart.
27
th
July - nr Teddington Lock
“He seems better,” Jay signed.
Tuck shrugged. She thought Stewart’s improvement was more to do with the morphine. It was certainly too soon to know if the antibiotics had worked. She nodded back into the main room of the apartment. It seemed a lot smaller than it had twenty-four hours before.
“We need to sit down and talk,” Jay said firmly.
“We do?”
“About these people. Do we join them?” he asked. “They seemed nice enough.”
“Nice, but odd.”
“Probably no odder than we are.”
She couldn’t disagree with that. The walkways had been impressive, and therein lay the danger. Something about it didn’t sit right with her, but she couldn’t place what. It wasn’t dangerous, as such, or she didn’t think so. There was just a feeling that she’d half caught something someone had said, and which suggested a deep underlying problem that in time could—
“So what do we do?” Jay cut in, interrupting her thoughts.
“Stewart’s sick,” she signed. “If he recovers, it’ll be weeks before he can use that arm again. Maybe months. He can’t come with us.”
“And where exactly are we going?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere safe. All that fuel that was on the boat, that’s how we get out of here.”
“We saved Stewart’s life. We’re responsible for him.”
“And we’ve done all we can for him.”
“We haven’t,” he said. “Hana’s a doctor. She could make him better.”
“She’s a vet. There’s a difference.”
“We have to try. I mean, what was the point of saving him unless we try everything? We might as well have left him to die days ago. We might as well kill him now. That would be kinder, wouldn’t it?”
Tuck sighed. She was tired. Not physically, but the sight of the small community and the way that they lived, how they had carved a small life out for themselves on the rooftops had destroyed another thread of hope. She had imagined that when they did find some large group it would be one barely different from the world they had known before. Not something so ramshackle and impermanent.
“Fine. You’re right,” she signed. “We’ll take him there.”
“Good.” Jay relaxed. “But how?”
“We’ll drive.”
28
th
July - nr Teddington Lock
They needed a wheelchair, so they looked for houses with ramps leading up to the front steps. The first they found was motorised and its battery was flat. It was a relief, in its way, since the chair was still occupied. The second had the sleeker, handle-free design of the independently mobile. The third had ‘Property Of St Thomas’ Hospital, Do Not Remove From Site’ stencilled on the back. It was perfect.