Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest (18 page)

Chester sat back, his appetite gone. “Not that I know of.”

“You didn’t live around here?” Greta asked.

“Me? No. I was on holiday. In Tankerton, you know it? It’s a little seaside place on the north coast. Or was. An off-season break, that was my plan. Something to look forward to as a way of getting through the winter. So I was there when they decided to turn it into an enclave. They planned for it to be a stopover point for ships going between the Isle of Wight and London. Plans and ideas. They had a lot of those, and they didn’t last long. A ship came in. I don’t think it was one of ours. It shelled the village. We took shelter. I’d been given charge of the children. They’d come from a boarding school, did I tell you that? Their teachers didn’t come with them. I don’t know if that was by choice or accident or even design. It doesn’t matter, does it? I was an adult without responsibilities, and they were children in need of supervision. We hid from the shelling. I don’t know how long it went on for, but it seemed…” He tore the film off the pack. “I don’t know. When it stopped, when we went outside and looked around to see who was left, there were fewer than a thousand of us. That’s a small fraction of the number that’d been there before. There were no plans then. A lot of people ran. The rest of us followed the screaming, sorting through the wreckage, trying to find survivors. We were making a bad job of a worse situation when Corporal Derry arrived. She told us about the nuclear bombs that’d been dropped along the south coast, how the government had collapsed, and how it was everyone for themselves. More people left, but she stayed, her and the soldiers with her.”

“We found her,” Chester said. “She was dead. In an empty house on a construction site about a mile from here.”

“Yeah, I thought she would be,” Styles said, emotionless. “She left last week and was the last to go. We’d had more deaths as we tried to bring in the harvest, and then, well, then it was just me, her, and the kids. The zombies were getting thick around the gates. She tried to lead them away. When she didn’t return, I guessed what had happened. A few more days, that’s all we needed. If we could have harvested the rest of the food, we’d have had enough to last until spring. We could have stayed inside, safe, waiting for the snow, and then for the thaw, and then…” he trailed off again.

“The people who left,” Chester asked, “did they go on foot?”

“They drove when we had fuel. They took the bicycles when we ran out. After that, they walked.”

“Always going west?” Chester asked.

“We knew there was nothing to the south, east, or north. West was all that was left. Everyone promised they’d send help if they found a larger group, or come back if they found a smaller one. They never did. Around June, after we’d stripped all the houses nearby of everything that could be of use, they did stop leaving for a while. I think people really did understand that this, here, was all they had. Then the undead came and in greater numbers than we’d seen before. We lost a lot of people fighting them off, and a lot more got sick afterwards. That’s when people started leaving again, but this time no one promised to come back. They just disappeared in the night, never saying goodbye.”

“So there are no cars left?” Chester asked.

“There are a couple of coaches,” Styles said. “The same ones we drove the kids here in. They were both full when we arrived,” he added. “But there’s no fuel. No, we’ve got food here. We’ve got a well. Staying isn’t safe. The undead come. You saw that for yourself, but it’s safer than trying to leave. We won’t starve, so we’ll wait. We can outlast the undead.”

“And what if a horde comes?” Chester asked. “You haven’t seen one of those. Millions of undead trampling through the countryside, destroying everything in their path. The only safe places are islands or cities. The buildings act like breakwaters, splitting them up.”

“Like you said, we’ve not seen one yet. There haven’t been many zombies around here until recently. Thirty-eight was the most we saw in a day, and that was about the same time as the sickness came. I’ll take my chances that no horde will ever come this far south over the certain death that the children will face if they try walking to the coast. Eat your meal. Sleep. Leave tomorrow if you want. I’d rather you stayed because the children need your help, but it’s your choice. Excuse me.” He stood up and left the three of them alone.

Chester took a mouthful of the soup. It was good, but he had no appetite.

“What about helicopters?” Finnegan asked. “Could they fly them down from Anglesey?”

“To here? I’ve no idea if they would have the range,” Chester said.

“We can’t leave the children alone,” Greta said.

“They’ve survived okay for all these months,” Finnegan said. “They can last a few more weeks.”

“They won’t,” Chester said. “And they haven’t. There’s only forty-four of them left, and you know how they managed it? You heard what he said. The undead appeared when people stopped leaving. Just think about it, all those hundreds of people leaving every other day or so, and all heading west. They lured the zombies away. Now there’s no one left to make that unwitting sacrifice, the undead will come back. They’ll gather at the walls. Their numbers will grow until the gates break, and then every last one of those children will die.”

“Then we have to get them out,” Greta said.

“Yeah, we do,” Chester said. He was thinking about Anglesey and how so few children had reached the sanctuary there. Of how Jay was the youngest of the survivors in London. He remembered the airport, and all those tiny undead creatures tripping and staggering along the runway. “And we’ll do it the only way we can. We’ll drive one of those coaches to the coast, load them onto the lifeboat, then get Anglesey to send help. They will, for children. I guarantee that.”

“He said there was no fuel,” Greta said.

“So I’ll go back to London. I’ll get the boat to come back upriver, and we’ll return with enough diesel to drive to the sea. There, that’s a simple enough plan. You two can stay here, and well, you don’t need me to tell you what to do. Excuse me.” And he left the room, going outside to look for Styles.

He found the man in a battered deckchair a quarter way through the pack of cigarettes, the butts lying amidst a thin pile of ash at his feet.

“Smoke?” He offered the pack to Chester, who took one.

“I’m going to leave tomorrow,” Chester said, “and come back with enough diesel to drive those kids to the coast. We’ll rendezvous with the boat and take them to London. Then to Wales.”

“Really?” Styles sounded distant.

“Greta and Finnegan are solid. Reliable. They’ll help you with the kids.”

“You know,” Styles said, dropping the half-smoked cigarette to the floor, “you’re not the first person to have said that.” He took another from the pack. “It’s what everyone says. They’ll leave, but they’ll come back, and when they do, everything will be fine.” He took out a battered silver lighter. “But where are they now? You want a light?”

“No, I think I’ll keep this. The last one. I’ll give it back to you when we get to London.”

“Ah, I see, you’re of a metaphorical frame of mind. Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. This garden is what humanity has been reduced to. Our Eden has become purgatory, a—”

“Harry?” It was Janine, she’d come from inside the house. “It’s Marko,” she said. “He’s having nightmares again.”

Styles took a long look at the unlit cigarette, then put it away and stood up. “I know my duty,” he said. “Look around, and tell me you know yours.” He went back into the house.

Chester took a walk through the grounds, looking at the plants, then at the trees, and the greenhouses. Most of those were sheets of glass propped against frames improvised from shelving units. From the uniformity of the brackets, he wondered whether they’d all come from one of those self-assembly furniture stores. Of course, it didn’t matter.

He picked a path between the beds until he reached the rear of the house and found the two coaches. After a brief examination, he decided both were drivable, though the tyres were tending towards flat.

It was thirty miles to the coast in a straight line. Two gallons of diesel would be all they’d need. Call it forty miles and three gallons to be safe. He gave one of the tyres a kick.

A drop of rain fell from the sky. Then another. He took that as a sign and went to join Greta and Finnegan in the small building near the pool.

20
th
September

When morning came, Finnegan was still alive. Out of the three of them, he was the one who seemed most surprised.

“It should take a day to get back to London,” Chester said, standing by the ladder leaning against the wall. “So give me two, and another two to return.”

“And if you’re not back in four days?” Greta asked.

“You’ll have to use your best judgement. There’s the raft back on that beach. Or maybe you could try and find fuel for those coaches. I don’t think you can stay here. You feel that chill in the air. You saw the rain last night? It’s going to get worse. The weather’s changing, and if I don’t make it, I can’t imagine anyone else ever stumbling across this place.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Finnegan said. “We’ve got the easy job.”

“Yeah, alright.” He supposed he should talk to Greta alone, but tact seemed out of place. “It’s been well over twelve hours. You should be fine. On the other hand, I thought Reece was going to be fine. Keep an eye on him,” he added to Greta. “Just in case.” They both nodded. “Right. So, if all goes well,” he added, speaking quickly to brush over the awkward moment, “be ready to leave in four days.”

“You’ll be coming back by bike?” Greta asked.

“Possibly. If I see a car somewhere by the Thames, then perhaps we’ll drive. But however we get here we’ll be wanting to leave straight away. Right. Any questions. No?” He flexed his arms, and then his legs. He’d taped thin strips of hard plastic taken from the window blinds in the solarium to the inside of his jacket. They made movement more difficult, but his mind was on the journey over the QE2 Bridge. “Well, good luck.”

He turned and climbed over the wall.

He made no attempt at keeping quiet as he set off. In fact, he did the opposite. Walking slowly, whistling loudly, he wheeled the bike to the junction, and then sat watching the undead. When the nearest was close enough that he could discern its lank strands of hair drifting with the wind, he pushed off.

Occasionally checking to make sure the undead were following him, he rode away from the mansion. There were twenty-five of the creatures immediately behind him when he stopped on a rise a quarter of a mile from the walled house. His eyes tracked back to the mansion and he caught sight of the word ‘Help’ painted on the roof of the one-storey extension. He’d not asked when Styles had done that. He looked up. Didn’t Anglesey have three satellites? Two for monitoring the horde, and one to survey the country. Or was it the other way round? It didn’t matter. He’d seen signs like that before on more empty houses than he could remember. Even if the satellite was overhead, even if it saw that sign, no one would assume it meant there was life inside.

He took one last look at the house. “Does sort of look like a guitar,” he murmured. “How the other half did live.” And he let gravity carry him down the hill.

After a frustrating two hours of cutting through fields, he switched to a railway line, managing five miles in quick time before he found a huge pack of the undead clustered around a dozen stalled locomotives. There were hundreds of them, most motionless. From the trampled gardens, broken fences, and battered doors, they’d milled through the town trying to get to those trains. Perhaps someone had been chased there and taken refuge on top. Or maybe they’d driven one of the trains, and that was the point at which they had stalled. Chester couldn’t tell, except that it must have happened months before. He turned the bike around. Surely there couldn’t be anyone still on a train’s roof, starving, dehydrated, and just wishing for that slow death as an alternative to…

“Oy!” he yelled. He yelled again. The zombies turned. He found he was laughing as he set off, the undead trailing after him.

Ten miles later and completely lost, he was cycling along a road parallel to a small river. He was nearly certain it wasn’t the Medway, and was wracking his memory trying to come up with the name of any other river in Kent, when a zombie toppled down on him from the roof of a parked van.

Its open mouth clamped onto on his arm, and Chester, the bike, and the zombie fell in a tangled heap. He was trapped with one leg under the bike, and the squirming, thrashing weight of the creature, still biting down on his arm, on top. Its jaw squeezed tighter and tighter, its clawed hands flailed and plucked at the bicycle spokes, and its dead eyes met his in a look vacant of thought or meaning. Chester pulled out the revolver and shot it at point blank range.

He pulled himself to his feet and tore off the ripped sleeve. Spots of blood pricked up from where the plastic had scored deep lines into his skin. He removed the spent cartridge and reloaded the revolver, then he realised that he’d left the first-aid kit back at the mansion.

“Fresh air’s the best disinfectant,” he muttered. “Where did I read that? Probably not in a doctor’s office.”