And though that task had taken the best part of the morning, they’d used the opportunity to clear a route between the apartment block and the film studio. No roads were completely free of the undead. Tuck had lost another two crossbow bolts, and Jay one of his knives, before she was confident they could get Stewart there safely.
At Jay’s insistence, they spent another two hours finding a bicycle, an mp3 player, and a pair of battery-powered speakers. If the van became stuck, he’d ride off, playing the music at full volume to lure the undead away. Tuck spent the journey back to the apartment coming up with a way to ensure he’d never have to do it. If they became trapped, and as much as she hated the idea, she would leave Stewart behind.
Jay’s other amendment to her plan was to strap two of the suitcases filled with their fuel cans and food to the vehicle’s roof. He’d reasoned that Stewart might remember having seen them in the boat. Better to take some with them and pretend that in his delirium the man had misremembered how much, than to risk the group going out to search for the rest.
“Besides,” he’d said, “they’ll like us better if we come bearing gifts.”
Leaving the wheelchair by the fire escape, they went back upstairs. Tuck checked her pack one last time.
“Should we wait until morning?” Jay asked.
“No point. It’s twenty minutes to the studio, then about the same to drive to that ladder. After that, we’ll be safe.” She placed a hand on his shoulder and gave the boy her eternally crooked smile. “It’ll be okay,” she mouthed. He nodded and tried to grin, but she could see he was nervous to the verge of terror.
Partially sedated, Stewart mumbled a string of apologies as they carried him down the stairs. Tuck turned a quizzical eye to Jay.
“He’s talking to that girl, again,” Jay explained.
“Tell him to shut up, then,” she signed.
Stewart didn’t, but when they opened the fire door, they found no undead to hear his incoherent ravings.
Crossbow raised, Tuck went first. Jay, pushing Stewart, followed close behind. One junction before the studio she used the last of the bolts. A sinking feeling of impending danger taking hold, she took out the axe, but the last stretch of road was empty.
They had the gate open and closed again with them inside without being seen by the undead. Tuck didn’t feel any safer. That sense of looming peril grew as they loaded Stewart into the back of the van.
She took out a map.
“This is us, here.” She pointed. “And I think this is where we rescued them. The houses with the red string, they’re around here somewhere. The restaurant with the ladder is here. Okay?” She handed the map to Jay. “If we get separated that’s where you go. Right?”
He nodded. She checked the back. Stewart, still in the wheelchair, sat amidst a bank of monitors and other useless television equipment, the bike propped next to it.
She climbed up to the roof, checking the road outside. There was only one zombie on it, and it was over three hundred metres away. She climbed down and into the driver’s seat, then nodded at Jay. He dragged the gate open as she turned the engine on and drove outside.
Her eyes switching between the mirrors and the road in front, she waited until Jay had closed the gate and climbed into the cab.
“We’re halfway there,” she signed, and pushed down on the accelerator.
Though she’d tried to follow the same route they’d taken a few days before, roads blocked with rubbish, wrecks, or the undead forced her onto unfamiliar streets, where she had to rely on the signs as much as her memory. Brentford, Chiswick, Hammersmith, Chelsea, Sloane Square, none offered any real help until she saw one pointing to the Natural History Museum. She remembered where the restaurant was in relation to that. She pushed down on the accelerator, throwing the wheel to the right, turning down a road made narrow by a bus that had crashed into the front of row of shops. And behind the bus were the undead, woken from inactivity by the sound of the engine. They slouched out into the road, their arms raised.
She accelerated into the growing crowd. Two went under the wheels, a third was thrown up onto the windscreen, a narrow crack appearing down on the left-hand corner. As the creature rolled off, one arm still trying to claw at paint and glass, it left a smear of red-brown viscera on the glass. She tried the wipers, but only one worked, and it did nothing more than spread the gore more evenly. But they were past the bus, the pack of the undead all now in the rear view mirror.
Almost there, she thought, but a moment later found that to be a lie. The road curved. Hundreds more of the living dead were heading down the road towards them. She stamped on the brake and took a hard left into a narrow one-way street almost blocked by an industrial bin. Her attention was so fixed on that bright yellow box, she didn’t see the zombie standing in front of it until the van slammed into the creature, crushing it between the front bumper and the metal bin behind. She put her foot down, pushing the bin in front, with sparks flying as it scraped along the brick wall. The zombie’s arms clawed uselessly at the bonnet until, with a rocking thump, it was dragged under the vehicle.
At the end of the street, she flung the wheel to the left, pushing the bin out of the way, then spun the wheel hard to the right, then left into an alley, then right, then left until she had no idea where she was. She just knew that that they had to get out of the dense warren of streets.
Jay’s hand suddenly shot forward. She spared a glance towards him. He was yelling the same word over and over.
“Red! Red! Red!”
Her mind whirred as she tried to understand. Then she saw it; a swatch of red cloth pinned to the side of a building. They were close. She took a hand from the wheel for just as long as it took to jab a finger at the map in Jay’s hands. Four long seconds later, his hand thrust out in front of her, pointing to the left. She took the next turn. They knocked another zombie out of the way, this one clipping the mirror, slamming it flat against the van’s side. Jay tugged at her left sleeve. She turned. She saw another red swatch. Was the road familiar? She couldn’t tell. Then his arm was across her again. She turned right, and she didn’t need his waving finger to know they’d reached their destination. She saw the restaurant ahead.
Scraping the sides of the vehicle against brick, she drove right into the narrow alley until the van stuck, the rear jutting out into the road. Jay had already climbed into the back. Stewart had been flung from the chair during the drive and blood was seeping through the bandages once more. But there was no time to help him. She climbed into the back, pulled open the skylight, then pulled herself up onto the roof.
Zombies. They’d followed. Hundreds of them. And the scaffolding ladder was another twenty metres down the alley. Jay might make it, but at the alley’s other end, another similar sized pack was heading towards them. Yes, she thought Jay might make it. Stewart wouldn’t. Nor would she.
She was about to reach down and haul the boy up when the end of a rope dropped down to dangle a few feet away. She looked up and saw Mathias’ face.
With Jay pushing, her pulling, they got Stewart onto the van’s roof. Then she grabbed the boy, thrust the rope into his hands and pointed upwards.
“Go!” she croaked. He hesitated, but took hold and started to climb. Mathias began to haul him up, and soon Jay was just hanging on as he was being pulled up to the roof.
Whilst she was waiting for the rope to be lowered, the van shook as the first of the undead slammed into the vehicle’s rear doors. The rope came down. She tied it around Stewart. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t tell what he was saying. They wouldn’t be able to lift him, she thought, not on their own. She grabbed the rope and climbed, quicker than she’d ever managed in training. When she reached the top, she found there was another, older man on the roof. Together, with the van shifting beneath him, the four of them hauled Stewart up.
And then it was over. They were on the roof, safe.
Slowly, sorely, as she realised the rough drive and hasty climb had bruised nearly every inch of her, she moved over to Stewart, but the older man waved her off with an ‘it’s okay’ smile. Gratefully, she sat down on a metal extractor pipe, letting her heart slow.
There was a tentative tap on her arm. She opened her eyes and saw Jay.
“That was…” he began signing, gave up, and just shrugged, his vocabulary not sufficient to convey his feelings. She nodded, and shook her head, finding that she didn’t know the words either.
“We need to get him back to Hana,” Mathias said.
Tuck sighed, stood, and taking it in turns to help carry Stewart, they made their way to Kirkman House. The older man was a professor. She didn’t catch what kind. Mathias had thought they would come back and so had been waiting on the roof. The professor had joined him so he could… and she missed that part. Although she was grateful for their assistance, she couldn’t help wonder whether there wasn’t anything better these men could be doing with their time.
“Tell them about the food on the vehicle’s roof,” she signed to Jay.
He did. The response wasn’t what she’d expected. It was polite, certainly, but far short of enthusiasm. And that, she thought, told her more about these people than anything else.
29
th
July - Kirkman House
Wyndham Square
“You sure you want to see Westminster? There’s really nothing left,” Mathias said.
“It was the cathedral that I wanted to see,” Jay said.
“On Victoria Street, near the station? That might still be standing. I don’t know if the fire reached that far. The walkways don’t, but I’ll take you as far as they do. You ready?”
Jay nodded, then looked to Tuck. She pointedly checked her gear one last time. Jay did the same. Mathias eyed at their packs and belts full of tools-turned-weapons, and said, “You can leave all that here.”
“No,” Jay said, looking over at Tuck. “We can’t.”
“Suit yourself,” Mathias said, and stepped out onto the walkway that led from the empty fifth floor window onto the neighbouring Georgian Terrace. Jay went next.
Tuck waited, mulling over the story they’d been told of a missile strike on Parliament, helicopter gunships, and a fierce battle. There had been survivors there who had refused all contact until, the last time anyone had tried to talk to them, they had found only the undead in the ruins of a very literal zombie parliament. Then there had been a fire, and no one had gone that way in months.
It tied in with what she’d seen at the enclave, but how it tied in with what she’d learned from Bran, she didn’t know. And whether the cathedral had been destroyed, no one amongst the group of survivors knew either. But they had come too far to not to at least go and see.
The walkway shook as the boy jumped off the other end. It was her turn. She began to cross.
It had taken two hours to get Stewart across the walkways to Kirkman house. It would have taken longer, but after they’d crossed the fourth rickety bridge, the professor had gone on ahead to get more help. He’d returned with seven others, but even then the journey was slow. It had to be. The walkways were narrow, designed for one person at a time carrying supplies, not two carrying an injured third.
Once they’d arrived at the house a man, Loflin she thought his name was, had gone back out to check the route. He’d reported a lot of the cement had cracked. Work would need to be done to repair the walkways if they were to be used again. No one seemed to mind that. The only question seemed to be whether the effort could be better spent building new bridges to the northwest.
They crossed the roof of the terrace, over another walkway onto a much larger building with a grimy ‘University of London’ sign stuck halfway up the wall. Then over three feet of planking that crossed a narrow alley Tuck was sure had been there back when Dickens was writing, and so on until they were back at the far longer bridge over Oxford Street. Tuck found she couldn’t watch the boy cross that flimsy walkway, so examined the mass of cement and pins holding it firm on this side.
“Ask him how often they come this way,” she signed when she had joined them on the far side of the bridge. Jay did.
“Not often, not these days. We wanted to get to the university buildings down by the Strand. We thought we could make use of the chemistry department, not to mention the apartments and department stores on Regent Street.”
“And did you?” Jay asked.
Mathias stopped, turned around, and opened his arms expansively. “Lady and Gentleman, welcome to London. To your left, right, and directly beneath your feet you have some of the finest stores in the land, from Carnaby Street to Saville Row, and even the London School of Fashion itself. And can we get inside? Oh yes, we can. But there’s only so many clothes a person can wear.” He tapped a square metal extractor pipe. “If the entire building is given over to retail, we can get inside. But if it’s apartments or offices, there’s often no roof access. You see that walkway there?” He pointed to a scaffolding bridge that led off to the left. “That’ll take you into Soho, Chinatown, and Theatreland. There are streets there so narrow you don’t need a ladder to cross them. Luxury six-room apartments next to cramped flats where they slept six to a room. To get inside, you’ve got to break through the roof or clamber around to some attic window, then you’ve got to break through the floor and deal with the undead, and only then do you find out if there’s anything left worth taking. Call it a day, sometimes longer. We’ve wasted a lot of time doing that.”
“Ask him whether there was much food in the restaurants,” Tuck signed.
“Some. It all adds up. But not as much as you’d think. I reckon, during the rationing, the chefs ate all of their stock.”
“Ask him where he got all the food from,” Tuck signed, because from what she’d seen the previous evening, though the diet wasn’t varied, everyone had enough to eat.
“Different places. There was a warehouse where the people had all been given the vaccine. McInery found it, her and… well, that was back in the early days. There was rice and flour and a lot of other staples, enough to feed a few thousand. We were worried it might be poisoned too. It wasn’t. Then there was this list of addresses which… well, basically we got lucky. A bit here, a bit there, it all adds up. Train stations were good. Theatres and cinemas. TV studios, too. Did you ever see that cookery show, ‘Feed the Nation,’? We got enough balsamic vinegar there to last us all a lifetime.”
“We got most of ours from vets’ surgeries,” Jay said.
“Yeah, those were good places to look. Didn’t they say there was a type of person who’d feed their pets better than they’d feed themselves? And this,” he said, “is as far as we go. Parliament’s that way.” He pointed, then nodded to an array of ventilation and air-conditioning units stuck on top of a box-like structure on the building’s roof. “If you want to go any further, you’ll have to go down to the ground, but you’ll want to climb up and see exactly where you’re going first.”
They climbed up.
“Which direction is Big Ben?” Jay asked. “That’s near where we want to go, isn’t it?”
Tuck pointed at the empty horizon.
“How far away is it?” Jay asked. “Shouldn’t we be able to see it from here?”
“It was there. About a mile away,” she signed. “But it’s gone.”
Mathias waited until they’d climbed down before he spoke.
“As I said, Westminster is gone.”
“But the cathedral is a mile away from Parliament,” Jay said. “We could go from roof to roof, if we had the scaffolding.”
“It would take months. Maybe years. But that’s only half of the problem. Come on, you can’t see it from here, the angle of the roof is wrong. You need to go to the edge and look down.”
Tuck took a step forward and peered over the edge. The street below was packed with the undead.
“Where did they come from?” Jay asked.
“The government built this nice little fortress along the river. They didn’t care about the noise they were making, because they had their walls. The undead came, and ultimately, there were too many. They got inside. Some of the barricades are still standing, others were destroyed in that battle, and some broke under the weight of the undead. The result is that they act like a funnel. Some weeks the roads are empty, some weeks they fill up. You could probably explain it with Brownian motion, maybe even work out a pattern to it. Or maybe there is no pattern, maybe the undead at the perimeter see someone, attack, and the rest follow. But right now, between here and your cathedral, there’s thousands of zombies. I’m not saying you couldn’t get there. I think if you ran, and if you didn’t start from here, and if you were properly prepared, then yes, you could reach the cathedral. But I don’t think you’d make it back. Anyway, Westminster’s that way, and you know where Kirkman House is. You’ve got your gear. Decide what you want. You know where we are. Good luck.” He walked back towards the walkway.
Jay stood, alternating his gaze between the empty skyline and the street packed with the undead. Tuck waited. She knew he had to get to the decision on his own. Finally, he turned to face her. He didn’t say anything, just stared at her. All his bravado was gone. He looked like the little lost boy that he was.
“We can’t do it, Jay,” she signed.
“We could try. Like Mathias said, we could probably get there.”
“Probably. But then what? We can carry enough food for a few days, but what if we get trapped there? Or what if we get there and have to move on straight away. Where would we go?”
“But Mum will go there. That’s where we said we’d go in the letter.”
“But would your mother really go there?” she signed, trying to find some glimmer of comfort. “She’ll be coming down from the north, won’t she? So she’ll see the walkways. She’ll investigate those.”
“You think? Why? Why would she look up? She might not come. She might not find that note.”
“That’s true. So, do you want to stay with these people?” she signed.
“I dunno. The electricity’s nice.”
That had been the greatest shock of all. When they had arrived at the house, and after Stewart had been taken to their infirmary, there had been a cold drink. It was the best she’d ever had, a true ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ moment, that had lasted just long enough for her to realise that there was only one drink each, and that only because it was deemed a special occasion. They’d had a supply of petrol, but that was now long gone. Stolen or lost, there seemed to be some debate as to which. Power came from solar panels from one of the department store roofs, supplemented by a magneto-dynamo attached to a set of exercise bikes rigged up to the massive battery formally belonging to one of London’s electric buses. It was enough to keep a few freezers running, the lights on at night, and the largest television screen she’d ever seen in her life running for the length of one movie per week.
“And they’ve got animals,” she added.
“Yeah, they’re alright, I guess.”
As Stewart had been taken to one of the offices for whatever treatment Hana could provide, Dev had taken Jay to see the animals. Tuck had tagged along, not wanting to let the boy out of her sight. The idea of using the soundproofed studios as pens for them was impressive. The problem was that they didn’t use them all the time. They exercised the animals by walking them along the corridors. Later, when they were alone, Jay had remarked that the squealing and squawking could be heard by the undead in the street below. It wasn’t that these survivors were oblivious to the zombies. Far from it, they had grown used to their presence, and she knew well enough that familiarity bred complacency, and it was there that the real danger lay.
“Well, what do you think of the people?”
“I dunno,” he said. “They seem nice, I guess.”
And she agreed. ‘Seem’ was right. The luxury of light at night and a cold drink on a hot day were the group’s goals. The construction of the walkways was the task that was celebrated, not the destination to which they might lead. It didn’t sit right with her. It all added up to an atmosphere of impermanence.
“I don’t know about that Mrs McInery,” Jay said. “I thought she was in charge at first, but she’s not, is she?”
“I don’t think anyone is charge. Not really. The professor, Hana, Mathias, and her, they seem to make the decisions together.”
“And can that work?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s McInery who wants to build the walkways.”
“Oh?”
“Dev told me,” Jay said. “She says it’s important. That the only way to be safe is to control as much of the city as you can. Did you see how she reacted when you told her about Northumberland and Anglesey?”