Tuck nodded.
“Do you think that has something to do with it?” he asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know if it matters. If we’re leaving, then we need to decide soon. Not today, but soon, before the weather changes.”
Jay nodded, then turned towards the skyline now absent of its once famous landmarks.
“Never been to London before,” he murmured. “Not since I was a baby. Mum didn’t want to come back. I said I wanted to see it, you know? See London. I always said I wanted to go to the place where she met Dad, wanted to see the places she saw with him, but that wasn’t true. I just wanted to see London because everyone did. Everyone came here but us. I think she knew, but she never let on. God, I miss her. I wish… I dunno. I mean, what’s the point in wishing? But if I could wish for anything, then right now that’s just what I’d do. I’d wish for anything, any one single thing to be different, because this right here…” He waved his arms to take in the destruction in front and the death down below. “… this is about as worse a world as I can imagine.”
But his back was to Tuck, and she couldn’t read a single word he said.
“I don’t suppose we have much choice,” he signed when he finally turned back to face her.
“No?”
“No. We have to go back and re-join the human race,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s a quote.” He gave a weak smile. “You should read more.”
Mathias was waiting for them on the roof of the Georgian Terrace. He sat on an office chair nearly lost amongst the shade of the pot plants, an oft-annotated street map in his hands.
“You decided to stay.” It was a statement, not a question, and said with an obvious edge of relief.
“For the moment,” Jay said. “We haven’t really worked out…” he looked over at Tuck, but it was Mathias who finished the sentence.
“What to do next? It’s how we all feel. Our lives before were all about the long term. Pensions, mortgages, saving up for that once in a lifetime holiday, our children’s—” He stopped. His shoulders slumped. A shadow of an old sorrow flittered across his face. He sighed. “And I guess you were thinking about going to university and life after that,” he continued. “But now, next week is the distant future. It takes some getting used to.” He glanced behind him at the building. “And most people aren’t used to it yet, but if you’re staying, then we need to have a word.” He stood up. “Think of it as an official welcome, if you like.”
It turned out to be all official, and not very welcoming. Mathias led them to a corner office on the top floor. Around the windows were the same myriad collection of pots and tubs they’d seen on the flat roof outside and lining the windows of the building’s corridors. Some were full of shrubs, others of green shoots, and a few seemed to contain nothing but dirt and withered stalks.
The office showed no evidence of the executive who must have once revelled in the promotion to such a vaunted view. Books filled every surface. Piled on the floor and stacked on tables, most appeared unread, just dumped there after they had been acquired. Only a few dozen lying open on a desk in the centre of the room looked like they were frequently consulted.
Tuck caught a few titles as she walked past. There were histories, some of London, others of agriculture, a few chemistry texts mixed in with some folded maps, and an odd assortment of fiction. And in the corner, in a space between the books and the pots, was a mismatched collection of sofas and chairs. In one sat the professor, McInery in another, with Hana in a third.
“Please, sit down,” Hana said, as Mathias went to sit next to her.
“That’s a lot of books,” Jay said. He seemed impressed.
“You’d be surprised how thoroughly useless most of them are,” the professor answered. “We thought we could find out at how farming was done in the medieval era and copy that, but as you can see,” he pointed to the pots lined up against the window, “our situation is completely unlike that of our forebears.”
“The books are no help?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Hana said, smiling. She always seemed to be smiling, Tuck thought. “They’ve taught us a lot about how we should have done everything differently. Here.” She picked up a map and handed it to Jay. “Do you see the part that’s circled?”
“Brockwell Park?”
“Just think about the name for a moment. Brock. Well. There’s a book here somewhere… where is it?” She flicked a finger along the spines of a precarious stack next to her chair. “Yes, here. This is a collection of memoirs of south London during the War. And there are photographs. I think the publisher put them in to bulk out the number of pages, but there’s a section about the anti-aircraft battery, and in this one, you can see the well.” She held a finger open on the page, tapping at a picture of a group of smiling, uniformed men.
“So where’s the park?” Jay asked.
“That’s what I mean about learning how we should have done it all differently,” Hana said. “The park is in south London, between Brixton and Sydenham. Retrospectively, somewhere like that would have suited us better.”
“It would have presented its own problems,” the professor said. “But we are here through the combination of circumstance. Mrs McInery came to the city farm which Hana and Mathias had not abandoned during the evacuation. She brought them news of the government’s betrayal of the people, and because of that they travelled north, not south, and found us here. With the undead hard on their heels, we couldn’t leave without abandoning the animals. So we all stayed.”
“But you could still move,” Jay said.
“Not really,” Hana said. “We’ve gathered too many supplies. I mean, yes, in theory we could go, but if we did that we would be starting again, and doing so without the livestock. We have food, and thanks to the animals we know we won’t go hungry no matter how bleak the winter. We even have a little entertainment. What we
must
learn is to scale back our expectations.”
“At least there’s meat,” Jay said.
“Sorry,” Mathias said with a smile, “but if you were expecting barbecue ribs for dinner you’re all out of luck. There’ll be meat next Sunday, and it’ll be stew. Maybe at Christmas we might roast a chicken or two, but maybe not.”
“But you will get an egg once a week,” Hana said. “And there are mushrooms. And there’s still all the supplies from the old world. It’s not a bad diet.”
“I guess it’s better than cold dog food out of a can,” Jay said, unable to keep the disappointment from his face.
“Like I said,” Mathias said. “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“We wanted to talk,” McInery said. “About these people you met. The soldiers.”
“It was only one soldier,” Jay said, and he went through the story of Bran and the women rescued from Northumberland once again.
“Ah, you see?” McInery said when Jay had finished. “Then we are it. They will fight amongst themselves and destroy one another. We really are all that’s left.”
“We can’t know that, not for certain,” Mathias said.
“No,” McInery said, “but it confirms our course. There is no leaving, there is nowhere to go, no rescue coming, no safe harbour waiting.”
Tuck caught the gist without Jay having to translate, and from the uncomfortable shifting in their seats, she could guess the woman’s tone made the others uneasy. She looked away, letting her eyes track on the walls, deliberately missing a few comments so that she would have time to think. She stood up and walked over to a painting.
“You know what that is?” she signed.
“A bowl of sunflowers,” Jay said. “So what?”
“It’s a Van Gogh,” McInery said. “I took it from the National Gallery. I have a Da Vinci as well. There was no point leaving them there where they would only succumb to decay and thus be lost to the world for good.”
“And lost Richard bringing them back,” Mathias added darkly.
There was another moment’s uncomfortable silence.
“Ask them how Stewart is,” Tuck signed, thinking it would be politic to change the subject.
“Doing well,” Hana said. “The infection had spread, but I think he’ll keep the hand.”
“It will be months before he can work,” McInery said.
“Which brings us to why we wanted to have this talk,” the professor added. “It’s not that we’re ungrateful. You saved Mathias and Dev, after all, but we can’t… um…”
“Everyone here works,” Mathias finished. “We’ve all got to provide. If you’re joining us, we need to be sure you understood that, but I can see you already do, so I don’t think anything more needs to be said on the subject.” McInery opened her mouth to speak, but Mathias continued, “No, we’re not kicking anyone out. As you say, we’re all that’s left. That has to mean something.”
From McInery’s face that was not what she had planned to say at all.
3
rd
August - Kirkman House
Wyndham Square
“It’s movie night,” Dev said. “Just as soon as it gets dark. That’s in about three hours.”
Tuck and Jay were sitting in the third floor conference room that was being used as a communal dining hall. The bowl of stew she’d just finished was not much of a reward for a long and fruitless day. Ha! she thought, and wasn’t that an appropriate description.
She’d led a small group towards Mayfair in the hope they would find fruit trees planted in the gardens of one of the areas many mansions. Out of the four properties they had been able to search, they’d found nothing more edible than wilted grass.
The first house had been empty, the garden covered in decking and dead pot plants. The second had been occupied by three of the undead. Tuck had been nearly bitten. She was so used to Jay listening for the living dead, she’d forgotten that these people they’d just met weren’t aware they would have to do the same. The third house had a cherry tree, but the fruit was all gone, taken by birds, she guessed. In the fourth house, they had nearly become trapped. It had taken an afternoon of clambering across fences, running down roads, and killing the never-ending stream of the undead, before they’d reached the safety of the rooftops. No one had died. That was the most they could say for the trip. That they returned empty handed didn’t seem to bother anyone. Apparently a lot of expeditions ended that way.
“What film?” Jay asked.
“It’s A Wonderful Life,” Dev said. “I was hoping for Die Hard, but was voted down on account of people wanted to see the snow. You know, as a way of dealing with the heat. I said Die Hard is set at Christmas but…” He stopped, and blushed. “I suppose… I mean, I think it’s got subtitles,” he said.
She smiled, waving away his awkward embarrassment.
“Tell him its fine,” she signed. “I could do with an early night.”
She watched them leave, gathered the empty bowls, and took them to the stack by the door. She nodded politely to the man, Graham, detailed to wash them. He looked aggrieved at the addition to his duty. Were they being washed, she wondered, or just thrown away. Surely there was enough crockery to save that labour.
She added that thought to the many others circling her mind. When she got to the staircase, she headed down to the office next to the fire escape that she and Jay had claimed as their own, but she found she wasn’t tired. She grabbed a book – a murder mystery by E.R.K. Daley set in an underground bunker during a training exercise gone wrong – turned on her heels, and walked back up the stairs to the roof.
It was empty, and she was grateful for that. She guessed everyone else was going to watch that film. It was a shared experience, she supposed, something they could all discuss over the next week. Debate the subtleties of lighting and camerawork and all the rest, and through discussion of something trivial, help build a truer sense of community. And that’s what it was, a community that had yet to be built. There was a fragile elegance to the group, as delicate as a watch. As long as everything was in its right place, it all meshed together, but should any single part break, then the whole would collapse.
The films, the communal meals, the rota for the exercise bikes, and the other one for mucking out the animals; it all held people together. As did the walkways and expeditions. What she had first taken as draconian rigidity was really prudent expedience. People working were too busy to think.
It was a simple enough tactic, but she wondered about the value of sending people out into London on the off chance they might chance upon a garden in which some previous homeowner had planted a few apple trees. Surely there was something better people could be doing with their time. There certainly seemed to be no need for more food, nor even, from what she’d seen, any need to ration it.
The only thing that was scarce, she realised, was water. She suspected that was the real reason they’d been going through the old maps. She tried to recall what Mathias had said about the rainwater being collected in the window’s guttering. Then she tried to remember when it had last rained.
And that brought her back to the question of whether they were truly safe. It was safer than the wasteland, certainly. Until the water ran out, and then it would all collapse.
We have the fuel at the studio, she thought. If we need it, we have our way out. For now, let Jay enjoy company and movies, and she could enjoy a full night’s sleep in the knowledge someone else was looking out for danger.