Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (4 page)

They made their way back to the warehouse, breaking into a vacant shop opposite the side entrance. There they sat, watched, and waited, each lost in their own dismal thoughts.

“No one’s coming,” Chester said, four hours later.

“None of our people, no. Any that didn’t take the vaccine will have come here and seen the bodies whilst you and I were wandering around Earl’s Court. They won’t return, but Cannock might and if he does…” her hand moved to the pistol sitting on the rickety table between them.

“N’ah. Not Cannock. Not now. If he wanted to come and gloat he’d have been here already. Trust me on that. Maybe tomorrow or next week or next year, but it won’t be today.”

“Well, we can’t stay here waiting for him. London’s a big place. There will be other survivors.”

“You want to go looking for them?” Chester asked, surprised.

“What choice is there? We can’t go to an enclave. I suppose we could think about leaving the country, but where could we go? It’s not as if the phrase ‘non-extradition country’ means anything anymore. Of all the things I anticipated, it was never this. No, we stick with the plan, the original plan. We find other people, and we take over the city.”

Chester eyed her sceptically, wondering whether she truly believed the words she was saying.

“So where do we start,” he asked. “We can’t go back to your place. Or mine. Cannock knows those addresses well enough.”

“We need supplies. What was in the warehouse?”

“Just the rations Cannock left us.”

“And everything else?”

“Distributed with the vaccine.”

“Well, at least we know of houses where we’ll find food. As for everything in there, anything given to us by Cannock is suspect. Let’s start by getting away from here. We’ll find a hotel. A nice one. We will see what luxury London can provide.”

Chester wanted to hug the walls as they walked through the capital’s deserted streets. McInery kept to the centre of the road. But she, Chester thought, was someone who could find a shadow in a noontime desert. He made an occasional show of peering through the windows of shops and cafes, ostensibly looking for supplies. Judging by the broken glass outside some, and board covering the windows at others, he wasn’t the first to have had that same idea during the long weeks of rationing.

Conversation between the two of them was sparse.

“We should find a car,” McInery said when they reached Oxford Street.

“Too noisy. What about one of those pedal cabs?” Chester suggested when they got to Holborn. He regretted it almost immediately. He knew full well which of the two of them would end up doing the pedalling.

“No,” McInery finally replied, just as they rounded a corner and saw Farringdon Station up ahead. “You know what we need? We need a bus.”

“Okay, and I can see that there’d be a pleasing incongruity in driving a double decker through an abandoned city, but how exactly is that better than a car.”

“Think, Chester. The new ones were electric. All we’d need is to find one of the charging points, rig that to a battery, and charge that from a magneto powered by a stationary bicycle.”

“Ye-ah,” Chester said slowly, his eyes taking in the abandoned station. He started walking towards the entrance. There had been a coffee shop inside, and with the stations closed, there was a chance it wouldn’t have been looted, nor the owner able to go in and take the supplies for themselves. “Of course, it’ll be me who does the pedalling, and I say the following with that in mind, but why not take the engine out of the bus and use it as a generator? I mean, if we’re staying in London, why do we need to bother with the wheels and chassis?”

He tugged on the gates. They were locked, of course, with a padlock at the top and bottom. Chester peered through the gap, trying to see inside. He thought, though he couldn’t be certain, that he could make out a jar of silver-foiled packets on the counter next to the till. The padlocks were cheap, generic models. Easy enough to pick, and even easier to break, but he would need a bag to carry the food and somewhere to carry it to. Until then, that padlock might keep out other scavengers.

“The Garland Hotel.” McInery pointed at the roof of a fourteen-storey building poking up above the cluttered Victorian rooftops. “Five-star luxury in the centre of the city. That will do us very well for now.”

“Sure,” Chester nodded. “Then we can see about finding some food.” And they could do that separately, which would give him some time to think. And perhaps during the night, he might… he didn’t know. The trouble was that McInery was right. They couldn’t go to an enclave, and he wasn’t sure where else was left.

Cutting through narrow streets laid down long before the age of steam, they headed towards Smithfield’s and the steel and glass of the hotel beyond.

“You hear that?” Chester asked.

McInery turned her head.

“That’s… something,” she murmured. “But what?”

There it was again. That odd sound. Familiar yet at the same time out of place.

“It’s a cow,” McInery stated, firmly.

“What? Really?”

“It must be from the city farm,” she said. Chester’s expression was blank, but only because he was trying to keep the confusion from showing. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve never been. It’s been there for decades. Didn’t your school ever take you there on outings? You could pet the lambs, see the cows, and smell the pigs up close. It never made sense to me. If they wanted to encourage city kids to choose a life of farming, the least they could have done was douse the place with an air-freshener first.”

“Didn’t really go to that kind of school,” Chester muttered, meaning that he’d not really bothered with school at all. “But you know what that means,” he added brightly. She looked at him quizzically. “It means,” he said, “we’re having steak for dinner.”

The soft lowing now replacing the skyscraper as their beacon, they headed towards the farm. When they reached it Chester realised why he’d managed to live, and by some definitions work, in the city without knowing it was there. It wasn’t a farm, not really, and not by his standards. Rural scenes depicting animals in pastures, fields of wheat, birds, bees, and trees had been painted on a long wall broken only by a wide sheet-metal gate. He’d walked past it often enough, but had always assumed it was just another abattoir for the Smithfield meat market. And he’d taken the little signs on each section of wall denoting which school group had been responsible for painting that part of the mural as nothing more than a futile exercise in discouraging graffiti.

“The gates are closed,” Chester said, giving them a push and a shove. “Closed tight. We’ll have to climb it. Ladies first,” he added.

McInery raised an eyebrow.

“Oh no,” Chester said with a grin. “If you want meat for dinner, we’ve got to get in.” He cupped his hands.

“Fine,” she said, as she braced herself, “but I can’t see the kind of people who’d run this type of place as the sort who’d leave the animals to starve.” She pulled herself up over the gate, and dropped down into the yard beyond. Chester took a leap and pulled himself up and over. As his feet hit concrete, he found she was right. They hadn’t left the animals alone.

They were in a courtyard that had been scrubbed to a near clinical level of cleanliness. Behind, he could make out a stretch of fenced grass that, in an area of seven-figure rents, would have given a property developer an aneurysm. In front was a one-storey ‘U’ shaped building with a two-storey extension built over the arm nearest them. Underneath the extension was a set of doors painted to look like wood-brown planks. Above it was a sign that read ‘Welcome Centre’, and in front of it stood two men and a woman. Each held a very long knife in their hands, and wore a determined expression on their faces.

Chester’s empty palms itched. He’d left the sledgehammer propped against the wall outside. He had the revolver, of course, and it was still loaded, but it was in his pocket. There were twenty paces between him and the nearest of the knives. He could probably draw and fire in time. Probably.

The double doors opened, and another woman came out. Unlike the others, she wasn’t armed, but that wasn’t reassuring. The disposable all-in-one suit she was wearing over her clothing was coated in blood and worse.

“Afternoon,” Chester said.

“What do you want?” asked the closest of the men, a man nearly as broad-shouldered and wide-armed as Chester.

“We heard the cows,” Chester said, keeping his tone light, forcing a smile onto his lips.

“Cows?” It was the woman in the blood-covered clothing who answered, and she sounded confused. As if on cue there was a soft keening from inside the building.

“Like that one. That’s a cow, right?” Chester asked, looking from face to face. Their expressions changed to one of bemusement, except on that of the man who’d spoken.

“Cows? If you’re hearing cows, you’ve got very good hearing indeed,” the woman said. “Must be good enough to hear all the way to the coast.”

Now it was Chester’s turn to look bemused. He glanced at McInery. She’d adopted that slightly hunched, squinting stance when she wanted to give the impression of harmlessness.

“That’s a pig,” the second of the two men said. “A sow. She’s in labour.”

“Sounds like a cow,” Chester muttered.

The woman laughed. The second of the two men gave a rueful shake of his head. The other two didn’t move, they just kept their eyes on Chester.

“We’ve nothing to sell,” the first man said. “And there’s nothing you might have that we want to buy. You should climb back over and go somewhere else.”

“Perhaps we should introduce ourselves,” McInery finally spoke. “I’m Mrs McInery, this is—”

“Woah! Keep your hands where I can see them,” the first man barked, stepping forward. The other man followed. Inwardly, Chester cursed. At fifteen paces, they were too close. He wouldn’t draw in time.

“I was just reaching for my card,” McInery said, her hand frozen above a pocket. Slowly, she reached in and took it out. Holding the piece of paper at arm’s length in front of her, she took a step forward, then another, and another. She walked slowly towards them, until the second of the two relented, took a couple of paces forward himself, and took the card. McInery raised her hands, palms up in front, and started walking backward.

“Mrs M. J. McInery,” the man read. “The Gideon Project. On the back here it says if the person with this card has been in an accident they should call you. And it’s got two numbers. You’re a lawyer?”

“No, a philanthropist. I run many charities, but at their heart is one goal, to give people a second chance.”

“Well, that’s nice,” the first man said. “But here and now there’s no call for—” but before he could finish the sentence, the door opened again and a much younger man ran out. He wasn’t thin, not yet, but judging by his clothing he’d been verging on overweight before the outbreak. A second glance at his face, and Chester put his age at late teens, early twenties, that age when every young man, against all better judgement and regardless of how scraggly the result, attempts to grow a beard.

“Hana, I… I can’t…” he stuttered. “It’s all gone—”

“Relax Dev,” Hana, the woman in the all-in-one suit, said, turning to the young man. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. But Kendra says she need you.”

“Excuse me,” Hana said distractedly as she walked back inside the building. The young man followed.

“And I think it’s time you left,” the first of the two men said once the door had closed again. He nodded to the woman. She went back into the building without giving Chester and McInery a second glance. A few seconds later there was a click behind them and a mechanical whir as the gate slid open.

“Well, goodbye then,” McInery said. “And good luck.”

Chester nodded to the two men, smiled, and followed her out into the street.

“What do you think?” McInery asked when they were beyond both sight and earshot.

“Six people. Possibly more.” Chester thought for a moment. “Probably more. Three cameras, one above the door, one above the gate, one in the yard. Clearly they’re watching them. They were armed, and they weren’t scared.”

“But do you think it’s manageable,” she asked.

He knew what she meant, and even for her it seemed overly callous.

“Just for fresh meat? What was it you told me? Always look for the profit. Where’s the profit in storming that place?”

“Yes, maybe you’re right. It’s been a long day.” She looked up at the sky. The sun was only just beginning to set. “And it’s going to be a longer one tomorrow.”

“You want to try that hotel?”

Almost as if on cue, the streetlight in front of them came on.

“It’s odd, isn’t it?” McInery said. “I would have expected the power to have been cut. But as long as it’s on, we might as well enjoy it. A hot bath and some hot food, perhaps with some cold wine. A bad day always seems better after a good night’s sleep. Yes, I think that hotel is very definitely our next stop.”

They approached the skyscraper from the rear and found the service entrance open. When they stepped inside, it was immediately apparent they weren’t likely to find any food inside, nor wine, nor even a good night’s sleep. The corridors were full of discarded suitcases. Where they weren’t, were piles of clothes. At first Chester thought they must have been dumped there when the bags had been searched for valuables. Then he realised that, no, they had been used as bedding.