Surviving The Evacuation (Book 8): Anglesey (28 page)

Outside, on the road, were two bodies, both undead. They were riddled with bullets.

“Rob must have come this way,” Kim said, shouldering the MP5 and unslinging the sniper rifle.

“Yeah.” I looked at the zombies lurching towards us. Soon they’d reach the gate. I wondered if it would hold. We’d find out when we returned. And we would return. The solar panels were intact, as were the electric cars and the turbines. When we returned, we’d kill the zombies, and properly investigate the house and its former occupants. First, we had to get back to the boat, though as we hurried along that old country road, I was certain we’d find it was gone.

It wasn’t. It was still there, tied up to the concrete jetty. But there was no sign of Will or Lilith, nor Rob, come to that. Just two zombies, standing on the quay, ten feet from the boat.

Kim unslung the rifle, taking out the two creatures before I could tell her to stop. I’d wanted to see whether they were heading to the boat, or following the coast. I was hoping, you see, that Lilith and Will had set off in pursuit of Rob. They hadn’t.

We’d come over in a sailing boat. A one-masted racing yacht bearing a picture of a setting sun next to its inauspicious name,
Sleepless Dream.
Lilith and Will lay inside. Both were dead, riddled with bullets. So was the boat, and it looked as if the rounds had struck the hull below the waterline. Their bodies were already surrounded by water, tinged red with their blood. I jumped down. The yacht rocked and sank an inch. I searched for a pulse though I knew there was no point.

“They’re dead,” I said.

“Rob,” Kim said from the jetty. “It had to be. But why?”

“Because Lilith and Will didn’t believe we were dead?” I said. “Or because they didn’t believe Rob at all.”

I saw the sat-phone, underwater, and a few inches from Will’s outstretched hand. Bearing in mind why the university had originally bought them, the device must have been waterproof. Perhaps it was, but a bullet had passed straight through the keypad. I dropped the broken phone back in the water. “He must have been calling Anglesey,” I said. “That’s why Rob opened fire.” I could be wrong, but it didn’t matter. The end result was the same. Will and Lilith were dead. The boat was sinking.

“Their rifles are missing,” Kim said. “Check the ammunition.”

It was gone. As was a large portion of the food we’d brought with us. We’d left it on the boat, not wanting to be over-encumbered when we’d gone to the house. There’d been enough supplies for all of us for a week.

“He can’t have taken it all,” I said.

“Let’s hope he has,” Kim said. “He won’t be able to walk fast carrying it. Do you think Will got through to Anglesey before he died?”

“Perhaps. If he did…” I glanced at the sun. It was heading towards the horizon. Dusk couldn’t be more than three hours away. “They won’t get here until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“Rob will have headed inland,” Kim said. “Away from any ship that might come.”

“And away from the house,” I said, looking along the coast. There was no path, just ragged patches of green grass and bare rock. “And he’s nowhere in sight. If he was, he’d have shot at us. We’re going after him?” It was barely a question.

Kim nodded.

I climbed back onto the jetty, took out the journal, and tore off a page.

“Rob did this,” I wrote. “He killed Simon. He tried to kill us. We’re in pursuit. Bill & Kim.”

Pursuit

“So he’s got Simon’s rifle, an MP5, and Will and Lilith’s weapons, plus all that food and ammo?” Kim asked. “How much is that going to weigh? A hundred kilos? That has to be more than him.”

“He’d have to have dropped at least some of it,” I said, turning my head left and right. We were walking briskly, roughly following the shore away from the boat. There was almost a track, though it didn’t really deserve the name. It was just a curling line of worn rocks where there wasn’t enough dirt for any grass to take root. After a quarter mile, flowering heather began easing its way through and around rocks that were increasingly covered in a light green moss. A hundred yards after that, the nearly invisible path vanished as the ground turned to a cliff that dropped down to a rocky inlet.

We turned inland, tromping through the increasingly dense heather with a stubby holly tree as our guide. It was strange. With the sound of the sea loud in my ears, I could almost imagine that the last eight months hadn’t happened, until Kim took a step past me. She raised the barrel of her rifle, pointing it at a dry stone wall. As we drew nearer, I saw the road on the other side. Closer still, and I saw the rifle propped against the stones. It was an SA80 with a silencer attached.

“Rob,” Kim said. “He’s beginning to lighten his load.” She picked up the rifle. “He took the magazine.”

I knocked a few stones loose as I climbed over the wall. They rattled to the ground, and I paused, listening, but all I could hear was the sea. We followed the road, away from the mansion, our eyes and ears open, not saying a word until we reached a T-junction where an even narrower road cut inland.

“He’d avoid the coast,” I murmured.

“Scared that someone on a rescue boat would see him,” Kim said, “but if we’re wrong…”

She didn’t finish, and I knew the fear. Rob had burdened himself down with loot, and that gave us the chance of catching him, but only if we found him before nightfall. Each branching road halved the chances we would.

“We’re not going to catch him standing here,” I said, and took the turning heading inland. Kim paused, laying the unloaded SA80 down on the road so that the silenced barrel pointed in the direction we were going.

“If we find him,” she said, “are we going to try to arrest him? Will we take him back?”

“I don’t know. I think so. If we can.”

“It’s not going to be likely,” she said. “This isn’t like Rachel, or even Paul. He’ll be armed, and we know his guilt.”

“Are you saying we shouldn’t try?”

“No,” she said. “I’m saying I don’t want to, and that’s why we should. Summary execution isn’t justice. And without justice, without laws, we’re nothing. We’re not a society or a community, just a war band with electricity. We have to try, we have to give him a chance, but only one.”

How can I describe Ireland? That was my first real sight of it. There had been a few trips to Dublin, and a few more to Belfast, but I’d never ventured beyond those two cities. When we’d arrived, we’d gone straight to Kempton’s estate, with barely an hour between making landfall and being trapped by the undead.

Ireland is wild, windswept, and green. At least, it seemed greener than anywhere I’d recently been. Holyhead, Caernarfon, Bangor, Menai Bridge, those might be small, but they’re still towns. Even Anglesey itself, though it’s mostly farmland, has rooftops always on the horizon. Before we’d found that refuge, there was southern England. In my memory it’s a bleak and forlorn landscape absent of life. During our escape from London, we’d stuck to the train line until we’d been trapped by the horde. Then we’d travelled through a cratered landscape as barren as the moon. Ireland, or at least that small corner we saw this afternoon, was green and truly remote. I suppose that’s why Kempton chose the location.

“Wait,” Kim said, and jogged a few yards ahead and to the side of the road. She reached behind an ancient marker stone so weather-worn that the name and distance were illegible. She held up another SA80. She grinned a feral smile of delight, and raised her rifle. Peering down the scope, she scanned the road, the hill to our left, and the road again. I eased the MP5 from my shoulder. Against the undead, I’d be wasting ammo. Against Rob, even an inaccurate burst would make him take cover. We began walking more quickly.

“He doesn’t know we’re following him,” I said.

“No,” Kim said.

“Lilith and Will were cold, but that might have been the seawater.”

“He’s got at least a three-hour head start,” Kim said.

“But he’s Rob,” I said. “He’d take cover as soon as he dared.”

It wasn’t at the first house we came to. The building was empty, the door open, the windows broken. The roof had partially collapsed, though it looked like a recent construction. “Wind and rain, I guess,” Kim said. “Damn. Another five minutes wasted.” She sighed and continued walking down the road.

Silence settled, but not for long.

“There,” I said, pointing. “Do you see it? A body.”

Kim’s rifle came back up as we double-timed it to the corpse. It was a zombie, and it lay just where the road bulged into the neighbouring field, providing an overtaking-spot for any driver caught behind a slow-moving tractor.

“Recent,” Kim said, gesturing at the black-brown gore still spreading from the dozens of wounds on the zombie’s chest and legs, and oozing from the larger hole in its head. “Twenty bullets at least. Probably an entire magazine. No… no if it was, he’d have dropped the empty one here.”

“We might catch him yet.”

After another ten minutes we came to another body. After twenty, a second. After thirty minutes, we found Rob.

Justice

I walked slowly down the road and stopped by the waist-high concrete wall. Access to the bungalow was through a wooden five-bar gate, currently held open by an undead corpse. Like the zombies a little further up the road, it looked as if it had taken at least a dozen shots for Rob to kill it. The other three bodies littering the driveway had taken a similar effort. It made sense, of course. Where in England would someone like Rob have learned to fire a gun? The question was whether it really was him inside the one-storey house. The front door was closed. The windows unbroken. The driveway was empty, but I was certain there was someone inside. Smoke drifted lazily from an out-of-character chimney flush against the eastern wall.

I was itching all over, but my palms were the worst. I hated having my hands empty, but it was necessary. I could almost sense someone watching me. I glanced back the way I’d come, but the road was empty. There were no undead in sight. No people either. Just me and the smoke, and then a shadow, moving past the bungalow’s window.

“Hello!” I called. “Is there anyone there?”

My mouth went dry, and I wanted to duck down behind the wall. I told myself that, as Rob was such a terrible shot, the safest place to be was standing in plain sight. I waited. I was about to shout again when there was a sound of something heavy being moved inside the bungalow. A moment later, the door opened and Rob stepped out. He looked exhausted. He didn’t look scared, but wary, confused. He had a silenced SA80 rifle in his hands, but the barrel was pointing at the ground.

“Bill?” he asked and sounded surprised to see me.

“Rob,” I said, and my tone was grateful, though not for the reason he might expect.

“I… I thought you were dead,” he said.

“No.”

“Yeah,” he said, taking another step, looking around. “Yeah, everyone else is. I’m sorry, but Kim’s dead. Her and Simon, it was the zombies.”

I wasn’t willing to play his game. “When we first met near Caernarfon,” I asked, “you and Paul were trying to get to Bangor, weren’t you?”

“What? Yeah.” He took another step, and craned his neck forward, looking left and right down the road, as if confirming that I was alone. “Why? What does that matter?”

Another judge might call that circumstantial, but it was enough for me.

“Did you know Paul before?” I asked.

“Why are you asking?”

I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a yes or no, but wasn’t going to ask him again. His guard was rising, and there was something I wanted to know, a question that wasn’t for me, but for a woman who must surely be dead. “Did you kill Nilda’s son?”

“No,” he said.

I didn’t believe him. Even so, there were a few questions that had to be asked simply so that I could say the words had been said.

“What about Lilith?” I said. “Will?”

“What about them?” Rob said. “I didn’t know ’em before, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’m asking why you did it,” I said. “Why did you kill them?”

“What d’you mean?” The barrel of his gun twitched. He took a step closer. My own hands twitched in an involuntary reply, but I kept them down by my side.

“I saw the bodies,” I said. “I know it was you. You stabbed Simon. Did Paul teach you that? You weren’t a very good student. You didn’t do it well. Took you five goes. Even then, you missed the artery. Why kill him? Why kill any of them?”

“I didn’t,” he said in a reflexive denial.

“You took their weapons,” I said. “That’s Simon’s rifle you’re holding.”

His eyes went down, and his head fractionally bowed so he could see the weapon more clearly. When his head rose, he met my eyes. A wicked smile slowly spread across his face, until it turned into a bitter laugh. “All right, Mr Wright. You want to ask questions? Then I’ve one for you. Why d’you bring me here?”

“To give you a second chance,” I said. “To get you away from Markus, and allow you to show that you had some measure of worth.”

“Yeah, you see, I thought you’d lie. You always lie, you and your kind. You killed all those people on the evacuation, and then you walk into Anglesey like you’re in charge. Yeah, I read your journal, but I didn’t believe it. You might fool all those people on the island, not me. No. No, I know that’s a lie, and I know you’re lying now.”