Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest Read online

  “It was,” Chester said. “But Quigley’s dead. So is Cannock.” But it was Cannock, and Chester’s association with him, that had led to him and McInery working, albeit unknowingly, for Quigley. Call it luck, chance, fate, or divine intervention, there was a thread connecting Chester with all that had happened. He knew it and felt it tugging at him even now.

  “And in Wales, after you met Mum, you went back to Penrith?” Jay asked.

  “To your old house,” Chester said. “We found the note you left that said you were heading to London.”

  “So why did you go to Hull. I mean, why didn’t you just come straight here?”

  “Because I had a satellite image of Hull,” Chester said. “And on it I saw there was a beached cruise ship with the lifeboats still hanging from the sides.” He gestured towards the boat out on the river. “I figured it’d be quicker to get here by sea than by land. It took us five days. How long did it take you and Tuck?”

  “Nearly two months,” Jay said.

  “There you are, then,” Chester said, though it wasn’t the whole truth behind why they had gone to Hull. The mayor of Anglesey had asked him to investigate whether the wind turbine factory in the city was still intact. It wasn’t. Chester decided that his version of the story sounded better.

  “And they’ve got electricity on Anglesey?” Jay asked.

  “From a nuclear power station. Probably the last one left on the planet. But that’s not much use when your principal industry is fishing, hence that trip up to Svalbard in search of oil, and how they ended up picking up your mother. N’ah,” he added, looking around. “I don’t think those zombies got in down this end.”

  “According to Hana,” Jay said, “there are always more of them around in the morning.”

  “That makes sense,” Chester said.

  “Except,” Jay said, “when you think about it, that doesn’t make sense at all. I mean, zombies don’t care if it’s night or day, right? So why are they a problem in the mornings? Why not at sunset? Or midnight? That would be more logical.”

  “It would?” Chester asked.

  “Yeah. Well, they can see, right? And hear things. I mean, not well, but they do use their ears and eyes.”

  “So?”

  “So at night there’s nothing to see,” Jay said. “They’d be like us, stumbling around. So one zombie bangs into something, the others hear it and head towards the sound. And because these ones can’t see either, then they’d knock things over, too.”

  “I think you’ve just explained how they ended up here.”

  “No, see, you’re not listening,” Jay said. “I’m saying there should be more of them.”

  “Well,” Chester said, trying to follow the logic and finding he couldn’t. “Just be grateful there were only three.” He looked beyond Tower Bridge to the ruined hotel the government had destroyed to form the eastern part of a barricade that stretched all the way west to Buckingham Palace. “No, they didn’t get onto the path down this end. The breach must be near the souvenir shop.” He pointed west and found his gaze drawn to the plumes of smoke rising up from inside the Tower’s wall. “It can’t have looked like this for fifty years. Maybe a hundred, but for centuries before that, cooking fires would have been normal.”

  “I never knew that anyone lived here,” Jay said. “Did you?”

  “You mean the warders and their families? Yeah, I came here once. That was a long time ago, mind you. I tagged onto a tour.”

  “Fogerty says there were a hundred and forty of them living here when the outbreak began in February, but they were all gone when he arrived,” Jay said. Fogerty had been a warder before his retirement over a decade before and was the only living soul they’d found in the Tower. “I suppose they were all evacuated along with nearly everyone else in London,” Jay added.

  “Evacuated,” Chester muttered. “Immune. Infected. Vaccine. So many words whose meanings have changed from what they were a year ago.”

  “Do you know how many?” Jay asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Chester hadn’t realised he’d spoken out loud.

  “How many people did the government give that poison to? The one they said was a vaccine.”

  “Back on Anglesey, they reckoned it was about ten million. I think that was just a guess,” Chester said.

  “And how many people died because of the nuclear bombs?”

  “When you add up Cornwall, the Isle of Wight, a lot of the Midlands, most of Scotland… well, it’s impossible to know. How do you distinguish between the ones killed in the blast, the others killed by the radiation, and the rest torn apart by the undead after what they’d been told was a safe enclave had been destroyed? We can only be thankful that not all the bombs fell, and that at least this part of the world is still liveable.”

  “Yeah. Thankful. Right. But what I’m wondering is how many zombies there are in Britain.”

  “Oh, I see,” Chester said. “Twenty million? Thirty? Forty? When you’ve got numbers like that, precision doesn’t matter. We’re never going to kill them all, so we’ve got to find a way to outlast them.”

  “At least we’re safe here, and we’ve got the river, so we don’t have to worry about water,” Jay said.

  “Well, yes and no. It’s tidal isn’t it, so you’ve got to wait until the water’s coming from inland. Of course, salt’s the least of our problems. The river’s full of the chemical run-off from the wrecked boats and ruined buildings, the ash from all the fires, and then there’s the undead tumbling over the broken bridges. No, it’s got to be filtered, boiled, desalinated, and distilled. Even then you don’t know how safe it is until after you’ve drunk it.”

  “Which is why we should test it on the chickens,” Jay said.

  “No, Hana’s right. They’re too valuable as a food source,” Chester said. He looked over at the lifeboat. Their hope was that if they gathered water from the middle, faster-flowing part of the river, it might require less purification. “And though we’ve got water, we’ve got to search for the firewood to boil it up. You spend all your time looking for one thing, and when you find it you realise you’ve run out of another. They’re waving.” He raised a hand and waved a lazy salute. The soldier, Tuck, raised a hand in return. “It was her idea to come here, wasn’t it?” Chester asked.

  “That’s right. Because of the water.”

  “But she’s not from London?”

  “No,” Jay said. “She had a friend here. A major. I think she served with him. You know, in the Army.”

  “Ah. Right.” Chester squinted at the figure in the boat. “I think she’s signalling to us.”

  “N’ah, she’s signing. She’s saying they need another ten minutes.”

  “That’ll give us time to find out how those zombies got in. Tell me, was it easy to learn sign language?” Chester asked. Tuck, or Lucy Tucker as she was now never called, was a soldier, though deaf and functionally mute as the result of an I.E.D. on some distant battlefield long before the outbreak.

  “It’s not that difficult to learn, and there wasn’t much else to do,” Jay said. “It wasn’t like we could leave. The zombies kept marching through the streets. Don’t know where they were going, but it went on for ages. She tried teaching everyone back at Kirkman House, but no one picked up more than a few words. Except for Mrs McInery, but she knew how to sign before, you know?”

  “Lucky,” Chester murmured.

  “What?” Jay asked again, and again Chester realised he’d been speaking aloud.

  “I was thinking that you were lucky. To have Tuck with you, I mean,” Chester said. “And the two of you rescued Stewart, right?”

  “Yeah, from down near Kew Gardens back in July. He’d been shot. Don’t know who by. Whoever it was, they must be dead by now. He’s obsessed with food. I think he’s terrified it’ll run out. I dunno, I suppose we’re all a bit weird now, you know?”

  “Yeah, I do. But there’s something about him, something almost familiar. It’s almost as if I…”
Chester laughed. “I was going to say I thought I’d read about him, but I don’t think he’s famous is he?”

  “Don’t think so,” Jay said. “He doesn’t really talk about his past, just sort of mutters about stuff. Mostly about a girl. I think she died. But he’s okay. Reliable, you know? And people like him, well, most of them do. Graham doesn’t, but I think that’s because Stewart took over the cooking from him.”

  “He’s not the greatest of cooks,” Chester said.

  “True, but he’s way better than Graham.”

  “Then he must have been terrible. There.” Chester pointed. “You see it? That’s how the undead are getting in.”

  To the west of the Tower, next to the river, was a small cafe, a souvenir shop, and a large gate. The gate was firmly closed. The door to the shop, however, was ajar. Through the gap, Chester could see the door on the far side of the shop was wide open.

  “You stay here and listen,” Chester said.

  “I’ve done this before, Chester,” Jay said. “I told you, me and Tuck spent two months travelling down from Cumbria, and it wasn’t just zombies we had to face. There were soldiers, too, and—”

  “And I’ll need room to swing, so I can’t have you right behind me,” Chester interrupted. “But I also need someone to watch my back. It’s called teamwork, kid. The time for bravado disappeared about the same time as the hospitals were shut down. Stay. Listen. Shout if you hear anything.” Without giving Jay any more time to protest, Chester went inside. He wasn’t being strictly honest with the boy, but that he was still a boy was the very reason why.

  He breathed in through his nose. Yes, there it was. That damp, musty smell. It might be the river or the lingering odour of those three undead they’d just killed. Chester didn’t think so. He’d trusted his gut most of his life, and on balance it had seen him right more often than it had run him wrong. Something fell over to his left. There, it was in the next aisle, moving, but not moving fast. He darted around the display of overpriced notepaper, punching the mace out. He hit nothing. That dry rasping wheeze grew louder, and it was coming from near the ground. Chester jumped back as a clawed hand swiped at where his feet had been. He swung the mace down. The creature’s skull cracked open, a foul-smelling slime oozed out.

  “Someone made an effort to reinforce the windows, but they must have forgotten about the door,” Chester said after checking the rest of the building was clear. “Now, give me a hand, we can block it with these display racks.”

  “This will work for now,” Jay said as they improvised a hasty barricade. “But we’ll need something better. And we should get all this paper out of here. And those T-shirts over there.”

  “And don’t forget those shelves,” Chester added. “They’ll burn nicely.”

  “They will.” Jay grinned. “Did you ever think you’d be doing anything like this?”

  “You mean living in the Tower of London, fighting off the undead? No, I can’t say I did.”

  “That’s not… I mean, I was meant to be thinking about university. That’s what Sebastian said. He was always trying to get me to think about the future. Mum as well, I suppose.”

  “Sebastian, he was your Mum’s boyfriend?” Chester asked casually.

  Jay laughed. “No, he was our neighbour. I mean, I don’t think he was… well, I don’t know. But he was the one who gave Mum that sword. Or gave it to me. And Rob took it back in Penrith. That’s how Mum knew I was alive?”

  “When she saw the man, and saw the sword, yeah.” Chester sighed. “But there’s no point dwelling on the past. Not here. You know these people. Who do you think you can rely on to do a proper job of clearing this shop out?”

  “You mean without having someone stand over them? Reece, Kevin, and Aisha. Xiao, I suppose. Yvonne. Greta. Maybe Finnegan, but I don’t know. He probably would, but not with a smile.”

  “We don’t need people happy, just working,” Chester said.

  “Yeah, but he’s tight with McInery.”

  “Is he? That’s interesting. She’s got her supporters has she?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, Hana’s the one in charge.”

  As long as McInery allowed her to be, Chester thought. “We best get back down to the lifeboat,” he said. “The tide will be turning soon, and we’ll have to set off in search of that Geiger counter.”

  They went back down to the wide cobbled roadway that ran between the Tower’s outer wall and the river. Chester started hauling on the winch. It, and the ropes, had come from a display of torture equipment. They slowly wound the boat back towards the shore until it was close enough for Reece to throw them a rope. Chester grabbed it and tied it off. He took a step back, stretched, then walked over to the gold mace that had been part of the Crown Jewels’ collection. He picked it up. There was a dent at the top, and the cross at the top of a miniature crown had broken off exposing—

  “Here, look at this!” he called out.

  “What?” Jay asked.

  “It’s not gold!”

  “It’s not?”

  “Look,” Chester pointed. “It’s just lead covered in gold paint!”

  “Of course it’s not,” Fogerty said as Reece helped the old soldier off the boat and up the slick stone steps. “You think they’d leave all that gold on view where anyone could steal it?”

  “And the diamonds on the crowns?” Jay asked.

  “All paste. Everything on display was a fake. That, of course,” Fogerty added with a sly grin, “is an official state secret. We were assured that the real ones were kept in a vault in Windsor Castle. Personally, I reckon they sold them off.”

  “Oh,” Jay said, disappointed.

  “Jay! Chester!”

  Jay turned at the sound of his mother’s voice coming from the castle gate.

  “I thought I said we’d meet you on the walls,” Nilda said, and there was no question in her tone.

  “The zombies broke in through the souvenir shop,” Jay said. “We had to get rid of them so the boat could come back.”

  “Well, I can see that,” Nilda said, looking down at the bodies. “Why didn’t you get help?”

  “We were the help,” Jay said. “When the boat went out to collect the water, we were on gate duty. Look, Mum, there were only a couple of them.”

  “And I kept an eye on him,” Chester said. “He wasn’t in any danger.

  “He would have been in less if he’d stayed inside,” Nilda snapped.

  Jay opened his mouth to protest.

  “You’re right. It’s my fault. I’m sorry,” Chester said, and in an attempt to divert Nilda’s ire, quickly added, “We’ll need to get a proper barrier up in that shop and empty it out at the same time. There were some T-shirts, notepads, that kind of thing, and they’ll only rot if we leave them there.”

  “We can use the cement they had stockpiled for the renovation works,” Fogerty suggested. “Once we get this lot inside, I’ll sort out a group. You’ll give us a hand, won’t you, Reece?”

  “Of course,” the younger man answered, though he still looked exhausted from hauling the water onto the boat.

  “And you, soldier?” Fogerty asked Tuck, who was helping Stewart and Reece load the water canisters filled with their dark, brackish, and thoroughly unpalatable river water onto the cart. “You’ll give us a hand with the shop?”

  “She’s coming with us,” Nilda said. “We’re taking the lifeboat down to City Airport for the Geiger counter.”

  “Oh yes.” Fogerty’s face tinged with the obvious embarrassment of an old man’s forgetfulness. “Yes, you said, didn’t you?”

  “It’s all right, we’ll handle this,” Reece said with a tone that suggested he knew he’d be the one doing the heavy lifting. “We’ll take the water inside and get some of the others to help. Graham was talking about going out to look for more firewood anyway.”

  “You want me to come with you to the airport?” Stewart asked.

  “Don’t you have eno
ugh work to do in the kitchens?” Nilda asked. “And isn’t that where you’re meant to be right now?”

  “Oh, yeah. I suppose,” Stewart said. “I just figured they’d need a hand with—”

  “And I’ll make sure Stewart goes back to the kitchens,” Reece cut in.

  Nilda nodded, her rage finally mollified. “Thank you,” she said.

  “And is Mrs McInery going with you to the airport?” Stewart asked.

  Nilda turned around. McInery was walking through the open door.

  “I said we’d use the drone so she could see what London Bridge was like,” Nilda said.

  “That’s my drone,” Jay said. “Dev, Stewart, and Tuck got it for me for my birthday. You should have asked.”

  Tuck’s hands moved as she signed. Jay smiled.

  “What did she say?” Nilda asked.

  “She says we need to get better at communicating,” Jay said. “She was being ironic.”

  Part 1:

  Life in London

  17th September

  “Keep it steady,” McInery said.

  “It’s my drone,” Jay muttered. “I’ll fly it how I like.”

  Nilda smiled. It was good to be back with her son. She felt whole again, not as if a veil had been lifted, but as if there was a thin tear through which she could discern the vague hint of a future. He’d grown in the months they’d been apart, and not just physically. That self-assured confidence his father had possessed radiated from him. Most of the time. Sometimes, like now, there were flashes of the boy lurking under the newly matured surface.

  “You can see the bridge, Mac,” Chester said. He pointed at the screen. “And I reckon that’s the deepest gap. Look at that surf. It can’t be more than a couple of inches of water. There’s no way we can get the lifeboat through that.”

  Fogerty, Reece, and Stewart had pushed the cart with its cargo of newly collected water back into the Tower, and the gate was once again sealed. Jay sat on the embankment wall, the computer they used to pilot the drone on his lap. The ‘copter itself hovered half a mile to the west over the ruins of London Bridge. Clustered behind him, McInery, Nilda, Tuck, and Chester stared at the screen which showed an image of the wrecked bridge in far more detail than they could see with the naked eye.