Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland Read online

  Surviving the Evacuation

  Book 9: Ireland

  Frank Tayell

  Dedicated to my family

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2017

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and (especially) events are fictional.

  Other titles:

  Post-Apocalyptic Detective Novels

  Strike a Match 1. Serious Crimes

  Strike a Match 2. Counterfeit Conspiracy

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  Surviving The Evacuation/Here We Stand

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Zombies vs The Living Dead

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

  Here We Stand 1: Infected

  Here We Stand 2: Divided

  Book 8: Anglesey

  Book 9: Ireland

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  For more information, visit:

  http://blog.franktayell.com

  www.facebook.com/TheEvacuation

  Synopsis

  Within a few minutes of the outbreak, Manhattan was overrun by the living dead. Within a few days, the undead had reached every corner of the globe. Ireland was no exception.

  There was no evacuation of Northern Ireland, and no quarantine in the Republic. A Royal Naval blockade prevented ships from docking, but they didn’t prevent those who could reach the coast from fleeing by sea. There weren’t enough boats for everyone. Those who were left behind took refuge in castles, police stations, churches, military bases, and any other buildings with strong walls. The walls weren’t strong enough.

  Eight months later, there are only a few dozen survivors left on the entire island of Ireland. They are certain that there is no safe refuge anywhere on the planet.

  Stranded on the southwestern Atlantic coast of the Irish Republic, Bill and Kim head north. They know that there is a safe haven on Anglesey, but that is hundreds of miles of undead Ireland and a treacherous sea crossing away. They begin a journey on which they will have to rescue the innocent and confront the past before they can embrace the future.

  Set on the island of Ireland, eight months after the outbreak, this is the next volume of Bill Wright’s journals.

  Contents

  Prologue / The Story So Far

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Prologue - The Apocalypse So Far…

  Ard na Mara, The Republic of Ireland

  08:00, 22nd September, Day 194

  “I made tea.”

  I opened my eyes and saw Kim smiling down at me, a steaming mug in her hand. There have seldom been more welcome words by which to be woken, and never a more welcome face to say them.

  “What time is it?” I asked. Judging by the grey light seeping through the window, it was a new day, though it hadn’t been for long.

  “It’s about eight,” she said, and held out her wrist. “I’m not sure. My watch stopped working.”

  “That’s late,” I said, pushing myself upright. I took the mug. “You let me sleep.” It was half statement, half accusation.

  “There wasn’t much point waking you,” she said. “It’s been raining too heavily for us to leave. Not so much cats and dogs as lions and wolves. Do you remember those?”

  “Sorry? Do I remember what?”

  “The lions we saw at Stonehenge. I was thinking about… it doesn’t matter. It’s been raining, that’s my point, and you needed the rest. But the rain is easing. We’ll need to leave soon. Drink your tea.”

  The tea was black, strong, and wonderful.

  “You’ve been carrying teabags in your pack?” I asked.

  “Just in case you fancied a brew? No, Bill, I found them in the kitchen. The builders must have left them behind. Or the painters, I suppose.” As the walls drifted into focus, I realised that what I’d taken for patches of damp the previous evening were smears of paint in a dozen different shades of cream. The bungalow had a few sticks of furniture, a wood-burning stove, and curtains over most of the windows, but no carpet. From that, I assume the owner was on the verge of moving in, but hadn’t taken the leap by the time of the outbreak last February. I took another sip. With the scaldingly glorious and vaguely floral taste came the realisation that my journal was on the chair next to Kim, propped open by a pen.

  “You were writing in the journal?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I was making a few notes on what happened, working out what questions we still need to ask.”

  “Questions? You mean about the outbreak?”

  “No, that’s ancient history,” Kim said. “I meant questions about Rob and Paul, about the murders. About Markus and Rachel as well.”

  “Ah.” I took another sip. “This takes me back. It’s like waking up to the news. One minute, you’re in a land of beautiful dreams, the next, you flicked on the radio to an audio barrage of all the murder and misery afflicting the world.”

  “You were dreaming?” she asked.

  “Something about a meadow,” I said. “The sun was definitely shining. You were in it, I remember that. Go on, then, fill my morning with gloom. What were the questions?”

  “I think I’ve found a pattern,” Kim said. “What do we know? That’s our starting point. Well, we know Rob was in his very early twenties. He came from Penrith. We know that’s the hometown of Nilda, the woman I rescued from that island off the Scottish coast. They were both part of the same group who’d taken shelter in a school. They were overrun, and that was when her son died.”

  “Probably died,” I said, “but, yes, he probably did. What was his name? Ray? Kay?”

  “Jay. Rob told us he was dead. He told Nilda the same thing, but she thought Rob had killed her son. Rob denied it, and said it was the zombies that killed Jay, but what’s his denial worth? I think Rob killed Jay, and it was then that he took the sword. And that brings us to my questions. Do you know what happened to Rob next? You didn’t mention it in the journal.”

  “Um…” I put the mug down, pulled myself up, and limped to the window. My right leg’s always worse in the mornings. Or perhaps I noticed it more because, in my dream, I was able to run.

  The heavy curtains, far too long for the window, had been drawn. The sun struggled to pierce the blanket of clouds covering every visible inch of the sky, but it was bright enough to see the driveway. It was bright enough to see Rob’s body lying among the corpses of the zombies he’d shot before we’d found him. It was more than bright enough to see what stood by the closed gate.

  “There’s a zombie out there,” I said. It was a wretched creature covered in mud. One arm rested on the gatepost, almost as if it was taking a brief rest before continuing its journey.

  “I know,” Kim said, “but it can wait until we leave.”

  I watched it for a moment, and realised she was right. It was just another zomb
ie, and in no way an immediate threat to us. I found my gaze returning to Rob. Kim had shot him, but only because he’d been about to shoot me. I thought back to the events of the previous afternoon. I’d confronted Rob. I’d stood, unarmed, in front of him and asked him to surrender. I’d asked him to confess. Rob hadn’t surrendered, and hadn’t really confessed anything except belief in an outlandish conspiracy. He’d raised his gun, and Kim, hidden a few hundred yards away, had shot him.

  Our trip to Ireland was meant to be a brief excursion, a simple mission to see if the wind turbines still stood and solar panels still worked. Our goal was a mansion called Elysium, built on the most southwestern tip of the Republic of Ireland by the billionaire entrepreneur Lisa Kempton. She was one of the conspirators, an ally of Quigley’s who’d provided financial and logistical support for the insanity that destroyed our world. The mansion was meant to be a hideaway for her and her people in the event the conspiracy failed and the apocalypse occurred. It must have cost tens of millions to install the turbines, build a tunnel and the subterranean rooms, but Kempton’s money had been wasted. The building’s occupants, with Kempton presumably among them, died long before we arrived.

  Six of us had set out from Anglesey: Kim, myself, Rob, Simon, Will, and Lilith. Rob murdered the other three. He stabbed Simon in the neck, and shot Will and Lilith. He left me in the garage surrounded by the undead, outside and below. He trapped Kim in the underground tunnel. And why? Because he thought we’d brought him to Ireland so we could kill him. It was lunacy, and made the deaths he’d caused even more pointless.

  “So much death,” I murmured. “And Nilda’s probably dead, too. Dead in Hull when that horde descended on the turbine factory.” We’d seen satellite images of the horde after they’d swept through Hull, and been unable to reach the woman on the sat-phone. “I guess that means that guy she’s with died, too. What was his name, Chester? So much death is associated with Rob. He lived such a short life but ruined so many others.”

  “You know the rule,” Kim said. “Don’t dwell on it. Come away from the window. You don’t want that zombie seeing you.”

  I thought it already had. Its arm rose and fell, slapping against the gatepost as if it was keeping an arrhythmic beat. I stepped back, picked up the mug, and finished the tea.

  “So?” Kim prompted.

  “So what?”

  “What’s the answer? Do we know what happened to Rob between leaving Penrith and arriving on Anglesey?”

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t head straight there, but… no, that’s about it.”

  “Okay, because Markus has a northern accent. Do you think he came from Cumbria?”

  “Markus?” I thought back to my dealings with the man who ran the pub in Holyhead. That’s an inadequate description, but it’s hard to come up with one that’s both accurate and fair. He didn’t steal the pub, since its owners, like almost everyone else from Anglesey, had been evacuated and executed as part of Quigley’s mass cull of the British population. Out of the eighty thousand who’d once lived on the Welsh island, around twenty people had survived to return. Sailors of the HMS Vehement, together with George Tull, Mary O’Leary, Heather Jones, and other survivors, had cleared Anglesey of the undead. Markus arrived soon after, found a delivery truck full of beer, claimed it for himself, and so was his trading post born.

  “Markus’s accent is Yorkshire,” I said. “Perhaps Lancashire, but not Cumbrian.”

  “How sure are you?” Kim asked.

  “Pretty sure, and we can always ask him when we get back.”

  “So you don’t think Markus knew Rob before the outbreak?”

  I finally began to see the direction Kim’s questions were taking. What can I say? I’m slow in the mornings.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Markus had renamed the pub The Inn of Iquity. Despite that, up until the murder, there didn’t seem to be anything obviously illegal going on inside. While Kim and Annette had been on their mission to Svalbard, Sholto and I had visited the pub on what can only be described as official business. We found the establishment to be clean and tidy, and the occupants sober. It was a shock to me, though not to my brother. Sholto had said he’d seen the like before. It was organised, and that’s what it reminded him of: organised crime. That being said, there was no evidence of criminality. Except, of course, for Paul.

  “What do we know about Markus? Not much,” I said. “He said he was a military contractor in Iraq, a truck driver, but that was a lie, and one in which Sholto caught him. I don’t know whether there’s a grain of truth buried there. Perhaps he was a military contractor somewhere else, or he was a soldier, or perhaps he was neither.”

  “Right. We need the facts, Bill, so let’s ignore speculation. What else do we know?”

  “We know that Paul is the key figure here. Paul hung out at the pub. He was working for Markus.”

  I’d first met Paul on the same day I’d met Markus and Rob. Will and Lilith had gone to the Welsh mainland on a scavenging mission. As volunteers were hard to find, they’d taken anyone who’d step forward. In this case it had been Markus and four of his ‘employees’, Paul and Rob among them.

  The five of them had left Will and Lilith at a golf club where those two had been surrounded by the undead. Meanwhile, Markus and the rest had headed towards Caernarfon. Paul and Rob had skulked off, and so Markus and the other two had been trapped. If it hadn’t been for what happened in the days that followed, I might have found that poetic.

  “What we know about Paul is that he was a killer,” I continued. “And Rob confirmed that, when he and Paul disappeared during that ill-fated mission to Caernarfon, they’d been trying to reach the University of Bangor.”

  “Did Rob mention the body there?” Kim asked.

  “No,” I said. “Though I wouldn’t have expected him to.” The victim had been stabbed in the neck, once. It was a careful, precise blow that had severed the artery. “But we can surmise, with absolute certainty, that Paul wanted to hide the corpse.”

  Paul had killed the man before Quigley had died. While there had been a few hundred volunteers willing to go up against the corrupt politician and his private army, the majority of the survivors expected they’d scatter to the four winds. After Sholto and I returned with the news of Quigley’s death, everything changed. Where before, few thought they’d be able to stay in Britain, afterwards, everyone knew that Anglesey would become humanity’s last refuge. As such, the university city of Bangor, across the Menai Strait from the island, became an obvious location for us to loot. For Paul, that meant the body he’d left there would almost certainly be discovered. He’d failed in his first attempt to return to the university. Before he could make a second, David Llewellyn stumbled into our midst. Sholto and I, Heather Jones and some others had gone to Bangor in search of supplies from the university. We’d found the body. We’d fought the undead. Then a ragged man had appeared. I’d almost shot him, assuming he was a zombie. He hadn’t been.

  “David Llewellyn,” I said. “Another dead body. Another one stabbed in the neck with one precise blow. And we know that was Paul.”

  “And Llewellyn was a soldier?” Kim asked.

  “Captain Devine thought so,” I said. Devine was a military police officer, one of the mostly military survivors who’d arrived on the USS Harper’s Ferry. “Is that the connection? Wait, no. We know Llewellyn was bitten, and that someone handcuffed him to a bed because they didn’t know some people were immune. That was in… no, I’m not sure where, but I think it was Paul who left Llewellyn behind.”

  “Hmm. Well, we know Paul murdered Llewellyn on Anglesey. When you, Sholto, and George Tull confronted him, Paul shot George and ran. That has to count as a confession. But Paul’s dead. Rachel shot him. So what do we know about Rachel?”

  “Not much more than we know about anyone else,” I said. “Captain Devine was conducting the investigation.”

  “Yes, but you were there. Come on, think.”

  “Well, Rac
hel works at Markus’s pub. I think she’s more than just a barmaid, and she’s got some sway over Markus. Beyond that, she shot Paul in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses.”

  “Which brings us to her trial. You didn’t write any of it down,” she said.

  “What was there to say? It took an hour for us to give our statements to the court, but the jury had made up their mind before they sat down. Of course they had. By then, everyone knew what Paul had done. There was no way they were going to find her guilty.”

  “And it was such a foregone conclusion, no one bothered to interview Rachel properly. Okay, so after the trial, well, no, before the trial, thanks to those satellite images that Sholto downloaded, we had volunteers wanting to do something, anything. We had some helping to clear the airfield. We sent small expeditions out to the islands in the Irish Sea, and others north and south along the coast. We had another group going to Belfast International Airport, and then there were the six of us, coming to Elysium to see if the wind turbines were intact. Did you want Rob to come with us?”

  “Want is a strong word,” I said.

  “I meant, was it your idea?”

  “I think Sholto originally suggested it,” I said. “Before he twisted his ankle, and thought he was coming and I was staying at home with the kids.”

  “No, what I meant was that Rob didn’t ask to come, did he? And no one else asked on his behalf? We weren’t coerced into bringing him on this expedition?”

  “No. We can’t have been. You, me, Sholto, Mary, and Donnie were sitting around George’s bedside. We were discussing what to do with all the volunteers, how best to channel their enthusiasm.”

  “Right, so when it came to putting together this mission to Ireland, we’d run out of people. It was our own fault. Too much time had passed. We should have acted sooner.”

  “We got a couple of hundred clearing the runway on Anglesey,” I said. “That’s pretty impressive. A few hundred exploring the islands. Another hundred or so working on the Parsons’ farm. That’s even more impressive.”