Surviving The Evacuation (Book 8): Anglesey (10 page)

“I wonder what happened to them,” Lorraine said.

“Who?” I asked.

“The royals. Coast’s coming up.”

The road leading east and inland from Bangor’s small football stadium was lined with cars on both sides of the carriageway, though their engines were all pointing towards the sea. Often parked bumper-to-bumper or door-to-door, they were rust-mottled, paint-scratched, and dirt-smeared with drifts of leaves gathered around the wheels and against the windscreens. A jet-black open-top had failed to shunt a family four-door out of the way, but had broken its windows in the attempt. The backseat was covered in mould and rotten cardboard almost the same shade as the paintwork. It was a desolate picture, a reminder of the desperate horror of those early months after the outbreak, and one that had been absent in our brief glimpse of Caernarfon. Every few steps, I found myself turning around, looking back at the sea, wondering how many of the drivers had made it to the island. After twenty yards, the gaps between the vehicles grew fewer and narrower, and I had to keep my eyes on the road ahead.

“There’s a black cab,” Lorraine hissed. “Do you think it’s from London?”

A low, rasping sigh answered before any of us could.

“I’ve got it,” I whispered, levelling the pike as the zombie rose from behind the taxi. Hair sprouted from a patchwork scalp of cracked skin. Withered arms extended from a crimson blazer turned pink by sun and black by dirt. I stepped forward as its receding lips pulled back from the broken stumps of rotting teeth. It gasped, letting forth a plume of foetid air a tone richer than the damp decay enveloping the stalled cars. As it lunged, I stabbed the spear into its eye. The zombie collapsed with a thump. There was a moment of silence quickly broken by the sound of flesh against glass. It came again, and this time I knew where to look. A three-fingered hand dragged against the grimy window of the black cab, drawing lines through the months’ old dirt.

“What do you think?” Sholto asked. “Would the sound of a gunshot breaking glass be louder than that creature?”

“Probably not,” Jones said. She levelled her rifle and fired. The sound fractured the deceptively still morning. We stood, waiting, listening, but all was silent save the distant waves and rustling trees.

“I can’t abide the trapped zombies,” Jones said. “It’s like they’ve been buried alive.”

It was a reminder that this wasn’t a holiday, a piratical search for abandoned treasure, or even a day at work. It was a journey into an undead city, with all the unknown dangers that held. I eyed the gore dripping from the pike’s blade. At least I’d learned the weapon was well made. It was a little heavier than the old replica from Longshanks Manor, and the balance was a few inches off, but it was reassuring having a weapon I knew how to use.

“If we’d been completely silent,” Lorraine said, climbing up onto the roof of the cab, “we might have walked straight into that zombie. I guess we need to be quiet and noisy at the same time.” She peered around and ahead. “I shared a house with someone like that. She could make tiptoeing up the stairs sound like a stampeding herd of elephants. I considered setting up cameras and putting it on the internet as a spoof wildlife documentary, but moved out instead. I can’t see anything. Just more cars.” She jumped down.

Her brittle cheerfulness barely hid the nervousness underneath. Something Lorraine had told us during our trip to Caernarfon clicked into place next to what Jones had said. They’d raided the coastal houses, but not come into the towns for months. This was as new an experience for them as it was for us.

“Onward?” I suggested, and Jones and her rifle took the lead.

The lane met the coastal road by a church that had been partially burned to the ground. A multi-vehicle pile-up almost blocked the junction, but I couldn’t tell whether that was where the fire had begun, or to where it had spread. Jones paused at the remains of a bright blue coupé. In the driver’s seat was a charred skeleton.

“Kerry Schultz,” Lorraine muttered.

“She’s the driver?” I asked.

“No,” Jones said. “She was a survivor. She died. She made it this far and a little further, but not to the island. We saw the fire when we were looting the houses further south. We came up this way and found her, about half a mile over there. She was trying to reach Anglesey.”

“She’d found a map in one of the safe houses,” Lorraine said. “She and some other people. They didn’t make it, but she died before she could tell us how many or where they’d come from.”

“She did say that she’d fought her way out of the church with Molotov cocktails,” Jones said. “Burns and blood loss, that’s what killed her. If she’d hung on for another hour, we’d have got her to the clinic. I don’t know if they could have saved her. Maybe even in the old world, she’d have died. But she got so close.”

“Onward, ever onward,” Lorraine murmured. “Because that’s all that’s left.”

Beyond the pyrrhic church, the road lay empty. To our left were scrubby fields, to our right was a six-foot stone wall and an embankment covered in trees. It can’t have looked much different a year before, except that the road was now tinged green. Without the passage of cars, there was nothing to stop a thin film of moss from spreading across the dimpled and cracked asphalt.

Jones pointed her rifle barrel at a side road. No words were spoken. The silence had grown, and we were all aware of it. There was no birdsong, and only one thing that could mean. One house, then two, then detached houses lined the road on either side. The gardens got smaller as the houses got closer together, but if anything, the bushes grew wilder and taller. Perhaps it was because the roofs and towering trees blocked out the sunlight. In comparison with the wide horizon of the open road, the sepulchral gloom only heightened the sense of impending danger.

After a hundred and fifty yards we came to a white van, stopped at ninety-degrees to the road. It looked as if it had reversed out of a driveway and slammed into the stone wall in front of the house opposite. A black minivan had followed it, but had been abandoned with its doors open, halfway out of the drive.

“Post-grad accommodation,” Jones whispered, gesturing at the house.

As we squeezed cautiously between the two vehicles, I spared a glance at the property. The top floor windows had been broken. Below them lay toasters, microwaves, TVs, cabinets, bookcases, chairs, crockery, cutlery, tools, and unidentifiable pieces of metal of every shape and size. Underneath those were three twisted bodies. I couldn’t tell if they’d been undead and there wasn’t time to investigate. A dozen zombies crouched, nearly motionless, thirty yards down the road.

“On three,” Jones said, raising her rifle. As she spoke, a zombie in a voluminous coat raised its head. At least, it raised its forehead and eyes. Its jaw, hanging by a shred of skin, stayed flush against its chest.

“Three.” Jones fired. Lorraine and Sholto did the same. I tried to count the shots, but there were too many and it was over too quickly. The zombies were dead before the nearest had managed more than a step.

“What did you—” Lorraine began.

“Shh!” Jones hissed. We listened. There was nothing. “What were you saying?” Jones asked.

“Well, I was going to ask them what they did with the bodies,” Lorraine said.

“What bodies?” I asked.

“You know, the zombies. There weren’t many by that house, and that got me thinking about all the undead you’ve killed. I wondered what you did with the bodies.”

“In the States, we dragged them away,” Sholto said. “Out in the wasteland, we left them where they fell.”

“Quigley burned his,” I added. “We’ll have to do the same.”

“Focus,” Jones said. “There’s a lane leading to the university up ahead. No more talking until we’re inside.”

Chapter 5 - Bangor

10:00, 19
th
August, Day 160

Bangor’s history stretched back centuries, though its modern reputation was as the quintessential university town. Half its population of twenty thousand were students. Before the outbreak, I’d been familiar with the train station, the hall where my candidate had given a speech, and the street where the radio-car had been parked. The speech had been forgettable, the interview anything but. She’d read a statement in Welsh under the assumption that it followed the same pronunciation rules as English. According to the internet, it was the seventh worst interview in history, though it gained her enough name recognition to forge a career at one of the more nationalistic English newspapers.

To make up for my lack of personal knowledge, I’d spent the previous evening memorising the road map. The city had seemed small. Actually walking through it reminded me of a maze. There was no central campus. Different faculties occupied buildings on seemingly random patches of land, divided by roads and interspersed with houses and occasional shops.

Jones pointed at a road far too narrow for the white line running down its middle, and almost too narrow for most modern cars. A moped lay on its side, twenty yards from the entrance. On either side of the road were stocky terraced houses with single-glazed windows and pebble-dashed facades. Jones took the lead. I took the rear. The going was agonisingly slow as we paused at every broken window, checking the house hadn’t become a home for the undead. My heart skipped when a shadow flittered across the road.

“Seagull,” I muttered.

Jones threw me a cautioning glance, then gestured ahead. The street ended in a T-junction with a red brick building, taller than the terraced houses.

“The Faculty of Biological Sciences,” she whispered. “The supply room is in the basement.”

We followed the road to the building’s main entrance. One seagull didn’t mean the town was safe, but I found myself looking over my shoulder, trying to catch sight of the bird. There was the soft sound of a silenced shot. I spun around. Lorraine had fired at a zombie staggering around the edge of the faculty building. She’d missed.

“I’ve got it,” Sholto said. He fired. It fell. In unspoken agreement, we began to jog. It was a shared desire to find shelter, to reach a place where we could regroup and rethink. We reached the main entrance, but were stopped by a chain running through the door’s handles.

“It’s new,” Sholto said, lifting the padlock. “Your work?”

“Not mine,” Jones said, her back to the door, her rifle raised, her eyes on the dark windows opposite. “And it wasn’t here in April. That’s when we last came this far.”

“So someone has been here since,” I murmured. “And why did they lock the door? To keep the zombies out, or to keep them in?”

Lorraine cupped her hands over the glass window and peered inside. “Can’t see any. Just a corridor. Looks empty.”

“What’s in the supply room?” Sholto asked.

“Digital scales that are accurate to a microgram,” Jones said. “And microscopes with the magnification to see something that small.”

“And we need that, do we?” Sholto asked, slinging his rifle. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small leather case.

“It’s the difference between regressing to the turn of the century,” Jones said, “or returning to before the turn of the last one.”

“So, yes,” Lorraine added.

Sholto extracted two thin lengths of metal. “I lost my original set of lock picks somewhere in the Atlantic,” he said, inserting them into the padlock. “I took to making them of an evening as I travelled through Britain. There’s not much else you can do without light but work away at… at a length of… metal.” He gave a twist. The padlock opened. “But everyone needs a hobby, and that’s a cheap lock.”

Lorraine pulled the chain free. We went inside. There was a smell of damp to the building. The problem with that smell is that it’s indistinguishable from the slow decay of the undead. Once again I was at the rear, the pike held across my chest so the pole didn’t knock on the floor. It was a bad weapon for this kind of work. Too cumbersome when you didn’t know from what direction danger would come.

An occasional pool of second-hand daylight spilled through the windows of closed doors, but that only emphasised the gloom. We stabbed our torches into every recess and corner. They were all empty, but when the light moved, the returning shadows seemed more sinister than before.

“You said the basement?” Sholto asked, swinging torch and rifle left and right with a pendulous regularity.

“That’s where the supply room is,” Jones whispered “There are stairs just after the corridor branches. Look to your left, it’s the door with no windows.”

“No windows? Great,” Lorraine muttered.

We reached the door to the stairwell. Sholto pushed it open. The hinges creaked. Collectively holding our breath, we waited, listening. There was a distant, irregular banging from somewhere, though not close, and not from inside the stairwell.

“It sounds like a window shutter,” I said, more wishful than confident.

“Let’s get this over with,” Lorraine said, pushing past my brother. Jones quickly followed, then Sholto. I stepped inside, letting the door close quietly behind me.

I shone the torch at the stairs leading up, more than half expecting a torrent of the undead to pour down from above. There were scuffmarks near the landing, eleven steps above. On the wall parallel to them, three jagged gashes had been scored through the paintwork. They were roughly at shoulder height, so probably meant a fight, though there was no blood, no body.

“Bill!” Sholto called softly.

I went down. Lorraine was standing by a blue painted door. Jones had her rifle trained on it, the light shining on the no-admittance notice.

“Locked?” I asked.

“No. It was electric,” Jones whispered. “Ready?”

Sholto raised his rifle. There wasn’t room for me to do anything with my pike except keep it out of the way. Lorraine pulled the door open. The corridor beyond was narrower than the one above. The ceiling was lower, tiled with polystyrene panels interspersed with the vents from the now-defunct air-conditioning system. Off the corridor on either side were closed doors painted the same blue as the stairwell’s handrail. Each had a window, but the glass was opaque.

“Shall we?” Lorraine said. “And can we be quick?”

Jones led us down the corridor, stopping two doors from the entrance. “It’s here,” she said. There were no markings on the door. “Sholto?”

He shone his light on the lock. “Sorry. You can’t pick that lock. Or I can’t, at least. We’ll have to force it open.”

Finally feeling like I served some purpose on the trip, I rammed the pike between frame and door, and levered until the wood splintered. Jones went inside. Sholto followed.

“I’m staying out here,” Lorraine said.

I was glad to wait with her. “Are you thinking about the chain on the front door?” I asked.

“Aren’t you?” she replied.

“Well?” I heard Sholto ask from inside. “Is it all here?”

“Hard to be sure,” Jones said. “I think so. The scales. The microscopes. Slides. Ah, the micrometres.” There was the sound of something being stuffed into a bag. A moment later she came out.

“Are we done?” Lorraine asked, her earlier bonhomie gone.

“For now,” Jones said. “We’ll need to come back for everything else.”

“Good.” Lorraine walked briskly back to the stairwell.

It was a relief to get back to the ground floor and its irregular second-hand light. The knocking we’d heard earlier had ceased. I hoped it was just an open window, caught in the breeze, but I kept the pike ready.

“Back outside, yes?” Lorraine asked.

“Not that way,” Jones said. “I want to check something.”

I didn’t ask what. It was clear there were other rooms she wanted to check, and equally clear that she wasn’t sharing that with Lorraine so as not to ramp up the woman’s fears. That did nothing for my own fears of course, but they had shifted from what might be inside the building to what we’d found outside.

“Why chain up the front door?” I murmured, as we followed Jones away from the stairwell.

“To keep it clear of the undead so it could be used as a refuge,” Sholto suggested.

“It would only be a refuge for someone who had the key,” I said. “Perhaps we should have looked for one. In London, I left a notice on the doors of secure buildings for anyone who might come after me.”

“I did that in America,” he said. “Left notes, I mean. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why. The conclusion I reached was that it was a rejection of solitude, a quiet plea to the universe that there should be some other survivors. It’s odd, isn’t it, the things solitude makes you do? Not that it explains why the chain was on the door.”

“Heather?” Lorraine asked, a thesaurus of meaning within the name.

“Yes, fine, we’ll go,” Jones said. “There was a chemical storeroom somewhere on the ground floor. I thought it was down here, but it’s not. I’m misremembering. I didn’t come inside here that often. We’ll go, but not through the front door. We’ll check if the back is chained. This way, I think.”

I paused to shine the light through a dark window. The room inside had whiteboards and workbenches, but it didn’t look like a classroom. Then again, the last time I’d spent any time in a science classroom had been in school, and those hadn’t been updated since the 1950s. I’m not exaggerating; they’d still had wooden benches etched with the graffiti of generations of bored children. Since then, the only labs into which I’d ventured had been of the high-tech clean-room variety. Usually, that was when taking a dim parliamentary candidate for the obligatory photo-op among very smart people.

I moved on to the next door. It was windowless. I tried the handle. The door was locked. I was about to call for my brother to come and pick it, but closed my mouth on the unspoken words. There was no reason to assume a sinister motive in the chain through the door outside, nor any reason to check a locked room.

The next window showed a room with a long table at one end, and four islands in the middle. Each had a sink and cupboards, but it was too dark to see any more.

It was fear that was making me think the worst. Not fear of the undead, but fear of all the unknowns that lay in our future. There was a nearly insurmountable task ahead for which no one’s life before the outbreak could count as preparation.

The next door had no windows. I tried the handle. It was unlocked. I pushed the door open, shining the light inside for no reason greater than curiosity. The beam caught an empty room and a zombie’s open mouth. The creature was two feet away and staggering towards me. A swinging hand knocked the torch from my grip. I limped back a step, trying to pivot the pike between us. The zombie swung its hand again, banging it into the doorframe. One-handed, I thrust the pike forward. The point sliced through its thigh. I must have severed a tendon as, when the creature took a step, it toppled forward, knocking me down. I landed hard, but was already kicking out, trying to get my legs away from its snapping mouth. My arm was pinned by the pike trapped between our bodies, and I couldn’t get the purchase to lever the zombie away. Its mouth snapped closer and closer. Its clawed hand gripped my thigh. I grabbed the knife from my belt, awkwardly stabbing at its scalp, but I didn’t have the reach to do more than tear a ragged line through its skin. I was about to scream when a boot slammed into the zombie’s head. My brother was there. He kicked the creature off me, then, stamping on its chest, aimed his rifle at its head. He fired, and I breathed out.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Damn,” I muttered.

“You okay?” Jones asked

I ran my hands down my legs. The material was torn, my leg was bruised, but it didn’t look like the skin was broken. “There’s no damage to anything but my ego,” I said.

Sholto went into the room to retrieve my torch and took that time to look around.

“There’s nothing in here,” he said. “No desks, no chairs. It’s a completely empty room. Why’s there a zombie in an empty room?”

Lorraine nudged at the body with her rifle’s barrel, opening the dirt-and-worse-smeared coat.

“What is it?” Jones asked.

“I… I think I know him,” Lorraine said. “Or… I sort of think I might.”

The bullet had done its work well. Too little of the face remained to discern any features. The clothing was reasonably intact. There was a rip on the trouser leg, under which was a ragged wound. That was presumably how the man had been infected. The jacket was of a thin, lightweight, breathable fabric. The T-shirt underneath was embossed with one of those meaningless vintage logos of a car at a beach.

“It’s the belt,” Lorraine said. “Or the buckle, anyway. I know I’ve seen it before.”

Whereas the clothing was the definition of nondescript, the buckle was anything but. Made of steel, it was eight inches by five inches, and showed a snarling lion fashioned in an almost baroque style.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

“No, I don’t mean I
know
him,” Lorraine said. “I remember the buckle, and sort of vaguely remember its owner from the island.”