Surviving The Evacuation (Book 3): Family (28 page)

“It’s over,” Sholto said. About five minutes had passed. He’d spent it working out how the burner worked, fiddling with it until we’d risen up above the grounds. I’d spent it staring out over the burning building and fields I’d known so well. The fire was spreading. Indistinct dots of flame moved erratically on their own towards the house. It took a moment to realise these were the undead. Their clothing and bodies were burning. They were flaming death stalking the land.

There was another explosion, smaller this time, and part of the roof collapsed. I wanted to remember it all. All that it had been, and all that it had become.

“It’s not over,” I finally replied, “not yet.”

“No? Quigley’s dead and you’re alive,” he said, quite cheerfully. “And we’ve earned ourselves a boat ride anywhere we want. I say the US. There’s just something about this country. The food, the weather, I don’t know what it is, but the longer I spend here the more I just want to get away. Over there, I’ve got food and weapons stashed at half a dozen places within a few days drive of the coast. You, me, Kim and the girls. One big happy family. What do you say?”

“No. Not yet. There’s still the Doctor,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It does. To me.”

“Look,” he said, “if this is about you being immune, then there’s a load of easier ways to find out...”

“No, it’s not that,” I said, finally turning my back on the inferno and slumping down onto the bench. “You shouldn’t have killed Quigley.”

“What? Why not?”

“I mean, not then. Not yet. There was one more question I didn’t ask. Whether the virus was part of Prometheus or not. Was it deliberate? Did he set out to end the world, or not?”

“Seriously. You think that matters?”

“More than anything. The wind’s carrying us south. We need to get to the Irish Sea. We might as well do that by going through Wales. Do you remember the Doctor’s address?”

“You really want to go there?”

“If not us, then who?”

“Kim will be furious if we don’t go straight back. Furious with me, I mean. You, you can make it up to her with flowers and chocolate and maybe a night at the ballet. But me, I’ll be in the doghouse for months. I tell you Thanksgiving is going to be real fractious this year.”

“It’s Britain. We don’t do Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah, well, I do,” he fished in his pocket. “Here. Annette made me promise, and I don’t want to get in her bad books as well,” he handed me a notepad. “Said she wanted to know what happened. For the journal.”

Day 137, 10 miles east of Chester,

English-Welsh border

19:00, 6
^th
August

“The houses of the dead, that’s all I ever see these days. Nice homes once filled with hopes, now just death and decaying memories.” I was in a bad mood.

“Don’t be like that. This is a nice little place.” My brother wasn’t. He was jubilant, and has been since we left Caulfield Hall.

The hot air balloon wasn’t comfortable, and it’s hard to sleep when there are only a few inches of wicker between you and a thousand foot drop. We couldn’t steer it. We couldn’t do much but let it drift through the night, occasionally tinkering with the burner.

It took three hours before the inferno at Caulfield Hall was finally lost to the horizon. Then there was nothing but the stars and the moon and even they disappeared behind the clouds every now and then. It was terrifying when that happened. There was no ground, no sky. All we could see was each other’s faces, illuminated yellow by the flames from the burner. A stray bullet, during our escape, had smashed the altimeter. When we couldn’t see the ground we’d no idea of our height. I kept thinking we were going to crash, that we were plummeting downwards and the ground was just feet away. But then the clouds would clear and, by moonlight, we’d see the ground was still a thousand feet below us.

Then the horizon began to glow, and dawn arrived. The feeling is difficult to describe. I saw the world anew. For the first time I saw what it had really become, this new world where humanity no longer rules.

The reddish silver reflection of dawns early light on the canals and reservoirs, and the occasional grey ribbon of road, the tall shadows cast by empty buildings, these were there, but they weren’t the dominant colours. I could ignore these last traces of man, and see how the world will be in a few short years. Green was taking over, except for where the land was scarred red-brown from the passage of the horde.

We drifted south, through the night and into the dawn until, around nine o’clock, the day began to warm and we began to lose height. It wasn’t a sudden drop, just a gradual descent in line with the laws of physics.

We came down in a field, some hundred and fifty miles south, and thirty miles east, of Caulfield Hall.

The landing was... interesting. There were two zombies in the field. They didn’t notice us until the basket hit the ground. We fell out of the basket, at about the same time as They began lurching towards us. Then an errant wind and the sudden reduction of weight, caused the balloon to take off again, bouncing across the field, the undead in pursuit, until it came to a halt, the canopy caught in the trees at the fields edge.

It took a couple of hours to find bicycles and water, and then we cycled until it was too dark to see. We slept for a couple of hours, and set off again before dawn. The balloon carried us nearly a hundred and fifty miles, the bikes not much less. I should be tired. I’m not.

“Yeah, a nice little place. Small, but not too small. With a great view. You can see for miles and there’s nothing to see but fields and trees. It’d be a great place to settle in when this is over.”

“I thought you’d got your heart set on going back to the US?”

“Oh sure, I didn’t mean this house, I meant one like it.”

“What about the hordes?”

“I also meant when the zombies die. They will, you know. One day. Whatever’s animating Them will stop. Then the world will be ours once more. When it is, I want a place like this. Somewhere I can see people coming.”

There had been five people in the house. Five zombies. They had turned recently enough that one of Them was recognisable as the woman in the photographs arranged neatly on the piano. Who the others were, whether they were friends or family or strangers seeking sanctuary, I don’t know.

“We’ll reach the Doctor’s house tomorrow,” Sholto said, as he sorted through the few half filled packets in the kitchen, trying to find something we could eat.

“Yup. In the afternoon I guess.” I was searching through a stack of board games looking for a chess set to take back to Annette.

“He may not be alone. If he’s still there, then he probably won’t be,” he said.

“No. No I suppose not.”

“They’ll be armed,” he said.

“So are we.”

We’d the two rifles and plenty of ammunition. Back at the paddock, whilst he was waiting for me to limp my way up the hill to the balloon, Sholto had stripped the soldiers he’d shot of all their ammo.

“OK, little brother, just stop that for a moment and look at me. Right. They will be armed. We’re not going to win in a fair fight, so we’re not going to start one.”

“No, and I don’t feel like another battle,” I said.

“But we may not be able to reason with him. He may be just like Quigley.”

“I don’t mean we leave him be. I mean we go across to Ireland, we get Francois and Leon and the crew of that submarine and everyone else who knows how to fire a gun and we come back in force. Perhaps that’s what we should have done to start with. It’s what we’re going to do now.”

“And if they won’t come back over here with you?” he asked.

“They will. This is important. I’ll make them understand.”

Day 138, at sea

7
^th
August

It turns out I don’t have to. Finding the coastal hamlet in which the Doctor had his house was hard. Finding his house was easy. It was the one with the flags flying out front. The house was empty. The Doctor wasn’t in.

It wasn’t a laboratory. It was just a Welsh country home bought with a London salary and a city-dwellers dreams of a country retreat. Judging by the mismatched furniture, empty wardrobes and cracked glass in the empty greenhouse, those dreams never became reality.

Taped to the kitchen counter was a map with directions to a boathouse at the bottom of the cliffs. Underneath that was a note that read;

“You are not alone. There are other survivors. The mainland is dangerous. We have found sanctuary. There’s food here, take what you need and just what you need. Leave what you can’t carry and, please, leave the place tidy. Follow this map, and come and join us, on Anglesey.”

“Anglesey,” Sholto said.

“Not the Irish coast.”

“Could be a coincidence,” Sholto said.

“No, I can see two houses from this window that would be better places to hold up than this one. It doesn’t even have much furniture. They picked this house for a reason. The only reason can be that they knew who lived here. The old man wasn’t just wrong about the Doctor not being at Caulfield Hall. He knew where he was all along. He lied about the Doctor and he lied about a village in Ireland. I should have known I knew he was hiding something. I thought...

“But if you’d gone on that boat and went to Anglesey,” Sholto said, “maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to go to Caulfield Hall. Then I wouldn’t either.”

“He wanted someone to do his dirty work.”

“Sounds about right,” he said. “A folk hero. That’s what he called me. The thing about folk hero’s is they always die before the end of the tale.”

“Well that’s an unpleasant thought. But it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Kim and the girls are on that island. That’s where we’re going.”

We followed the route on the map, along the coastal path and down the cliffs. Just where it was marked we found three boats, their fuel tanks full.

We’re about three miles out from the shore. The sea is calm, the sun is shining and in another hour we’ll reach Anglesey.

Day 139, Anglesey

8
^th
August

The lie was much bigger than we’d realised. Moored to the shore of the Welsh island, were more boats than I’d ever seen before in my life.

“It’s the flotilla,” I said. “The refugees from Ireland, from the UK, from Europe and the US and everywhere else. This must be all of them.”

“There are at least a thousand boats.”

“And how many more around the other sides of the island?”

“How many people do you think that is?” Sholto asked.

“More than a few hundred. More than can fit on a few planes,” I replied.

“Well, it figures the old man would have lied about that too. You see that? A light.” He pointed. I thought I could just make out a flash.

“They’ve seen us, then,” I said.

A few minutes later a motorboat far larger than the dingy we were in came roaring across the waves towards us.

“Welcome to Anglesey,” the woman at the boat’s helm said, throwing a rope to us. “Visitors, immigrants and tourists, all are welcome. Tie the rope off, and I’ll give you a tow.”

As we got closer to the shore I could make out people on each of the boats. Families, couples, groups, no one seemed to be alone and no one paid us any attention. I suppose given the number of people, new arrivals must be a regular sight.

There were two people waiting at the jetty, but they weren’t waiting for us.

“Hurry up ashore, then,” the older of the two said, “we’ve got to get that boat back.”

And that was it. Sholto and I were left on the shore whilst the motorboat, with its two new passengers, set off back the way we’d come.

“Some welcome,” Sholto said, as we looked around.

It was unlike any town or city I had ever been to. There were few people on the streets, and all of them seemed to be moving with a purpose. And they were all armed.

None gave us more than a curt nod or second glance. Most people, and most of the life, was on the boats. Sitting on deck chairs, tending window boxes, reading or talking quietly, it could almost have been a scene from before. Except for the silence. There was no music, no singing, no loud voices and no sounds of machinery.

“Alright,” I said, “where should we start?”

“I’m betting we’ll find the Doctor at the centre of government.”

“And where do you find that?”

“I think that finds us.” He pointed. Coming down the road towards us was a small group. In the front was an old woman in a wheelchair and the old man. About a hundred yards away the woman said something and the group stopped. The old woman, with the old man pushing the chair, came the rest of the way alone.

“You ready for this?” Sholto asked.

“For what?”

I’d no idea what ‘this’ was going to be and Sholto didn’t get a chance to answer.

“The brothers return,” the woman called out from a dozen yards away, loud enough that the group down the road could here. “Welcome. Welcome to Anglesey. We’ve been expecting you. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t get up.” She smiled. I didn’t smile back.

“Where’s Kim?” I asked. “Where are the girls?”

“Well,” she said, her voice now low so it wouldn’t carry more than a few feet. “Kim’s on the firing range, I think she’s working out her feelings for you there. I did send someone to fetch her. As for Annette, where would you expect to find a thirteen year old at this time of day?” She paused, waiting for a reply. When it didn’t come, she continued, “She’s in school.”

“And Daisy?”

“The hospital. But don’t worry,” she added hurriedly “she’s just under observation. Doctor’s orders. No one who arrives here is healthy and we’ve so few infants it’s hard to know what’s normal.”