Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland (26 page)

Around the truck and the boathouse I was driven by adrenaline, and back at the Manor, and at the Abbey, I'd been safe behind the walls. Out there on my own, it was completely different. I've never felt so alone, not even during that time back at the Manor when I was locked up in that room, with nothing to do but wait.

So now I just need to find fuel. I can carry Bill down to the boat easily enough, I mean, I carried him up here. But what's the point of moving him until we can actually leave?

Sometimes life is like a river, pulling you along a long defined path. All you can do is hold on and try and stay afloat. Sometimes you come to rapids and all you can do is hold your breath and hope you resurface. I read that somewhere, in one of those supremely mistitled self-help books. I always wondered, when you hit rapids, why you didn't have a third metaphorical choice, why you couldn't twist the boat or raft or whatever, get it lodged in the rocks and try and jump across from stone to stone until you reached the shore. Apparently, I was told when I asked, metaphors don't work that way. But why shouldn't they?

Where do you find fuel? How would I get it back here? I'd drive, I suppose. If I took Bill down to the boat first, would he be safe there if I went off for a day or two? Sometimes he screams in his sleep. Do I have a choice? I could find another car showroom, find more fuel and drive a car back here. But how long would it take? Maybe I could leave him for a day, but no longer. There has to be something I missed.

There are the fuel-cans we left in the truck and the car. Could I make it back there? There's no way I could paddle up stream, but we went by a couple of bridges as we drifted down the river. They hadn't been demolished, but were crammed with makeshift barricades. The undead couldn't get through, but I could easily get over them. Then what? What of the undead from the motorway? How many hundreds of thousands of undead are now surrounding that bank of the river? No. That's not going to work. What though? What have I missed?

12
th
July – 11am.

I shaved my head. It seemed sensible. Easier to manage. I started by cutting it short, but then the mirror slipped and broke on the floor. That's when I cut it all off.

It's meant to mean something, isn't it, when a woman is shorn of her hair. Well it doesn't. Without being able to see what I was doing, it was easier just to get rid of it all. Besides, the only thing to wash with here is the industrial strength detergent they had for cleaning the toilets. No hair is better than pouring that stuff on my head. A broken mirror, that's bad luck isn't it? Well, luck doesn't exist and hair grows back.

I suppose mirrors don't. I mean, glass and silver industries will need to be created first, but so what? How many mirrors are there in every house? A dozen, at least. How many houses per survivor in the world? How long before we run out, before we even need to bother thinking about how to make new ones. Centuries, probably. Which makes it someone else's problem. I've enough of my own.

Speaking of which, and the reason I took some time off this morning, I've solved how to get the fuel to the boat. I’m not going to write it down, not yet, that would add a level of confidence in the plan that I don't feel just yet. All I need to do now is work out where I can find some petrol. I took a bike out, as soon as it was daylight, and cycled about fifteen miles. The ground was so churned up I couldn't tell whether they had been fields or parks or football pitches.

I'd found the address of a garage on the broken rear window of a car, located the address on the map and thought it was worth trying. No such luck. The roof had collapsed, crushing everything beneath it. So where to look next? That's the puzzle.

12
th
July – 1pm.

I was sorting through Bill's pack, seeing if there was anything we could leave, anything we could get by without and I found that hard drive he's been carting around. It's still wrapped in plastic from the Manor. Call it curiosity, call it a distraction, but I’m going looking for a laptop.

13
th
July – 2am.

I found a laptop. Actually I found three. It wasn't that hard. I don't think Bill was really trying. I don't think he wanted to know what he was carrying around, not really. There are 71,394 files taking up two and a half terabytes on the hard drive. It's a whole mixture of formats, some I recognised, others I didn't, but the computer did. I didn't know whether I should start with the videos or the photos or the documents or the weirder ones with bizarre extensions I couldn’t even guess at. I thought the largest might be the most important. I don't know if it is, I haven't got to it yet. My eyes were caught by the smallest file, a text file titled “BILL READ THIS NOW”:

“Hey Bill,

If you're reading this then I've had to leave. This is an automated dump of everything I've managed to discover on Operation Prometheus. I don't know how much you've learnt, or how much you've guessed. You must have worked out some of it and I’m sure Jen will have told you some of the rest.

Prometheus was the US and the UK's post-Armageddon strategy for unilateral pre-emptive degradation. It all started with the vaccine, but you know about that. At some point someone realised that there was no way for us not to lose World War Three. Instead they gave up on MAD, and decided to focus on making sure the other guys wouldn't win. Come the end of the world, and that seems to be what we're facing right now, they want to ensure that the only people building anything more technologically complex than a fire on the ashes of the old, is us. Not the Russians, not the Chinese, no one. I've included all the target data I could gather, but I couldn't get access to it all. There should be enough to work out what the rest would be.

The above is not the point of this message. I’m almost certain Jen Masterton knows about Prometheus. Quigley certainly does. You've got to tell them that so does every other nation on the planet. Or the ones that count, at least, and they've got their own versions of the same plan. I've included that target data too. I've no idea how much is missing, but there's enough there to get the picture. With hundreds of targets all over the world, no one can win. We'll be lucky if we end up back in the Stone Age. If we survive.

If you can, you've got to tell Quigley and Masterton and anyone else you can, to stop Prometheus, but whatever you do, don't trust them. I don't know if Jen or her father told you about me, or what they told you if they did, but don't believe it.

I’m sorry for everything. I did try, and you have to believe that everything I tried was ultimately for you. If I can I’m going to try and head your way, if it's not too late.

Stay safe. Good Luck.

Sholto.”

After reading that, I sorted the files by date. I found the satellite images easy enough. It took a while to work out what I was looking at. Then I found the one of the Hoover Dam. After that, I had a better idea what I was looking for. There's one of a canal, which could be Suez or Panama, I can't tell. There are dozens that I first took to be tiny odd shaped islands, until I realised they were off-shore oil platforms. Some of the images look like ports, some like cities, others like mines or factories in the middle of the desert, others seem to be clusters of ships out at sea. Exactly where these images are of, for the most part I couldn't begin to guess.

I went out and found a map, a good one. I was able to work out where some of the targets in Britain were. There's an image of the Isle of Wight, another of the power station at Dungeness. There's another I think it's Birmingham and one I’m certain is Glasgow. There are others too, but conscious of the computer's battery life, I turned it off at that point.

It's a lot to take in. More than that, it's a lot to try and understand. There are, I think, some pictures of London. I’m not certain. It might be that I expect there to be, and so am seeing familiar shapes and patterns which aren't there. Bill was in London when Barrett saw the explosions over what must have been the Isle of Wight and Dungeness. If London was a target, then, for some reason it was spared. By whom and why, I've no idea. And if London was spared, then where else is still standing?

As for who Sholto is, what he was apologising for, that's another puzzle, one that I’m not going to expand my theories on here. You see, really, I don't think it matters. I can see that it is important, but it doesn't change what I need to do next. There is only one file in there that will help me rescue Annette and Daisy.

13
th
July – 3pm.

Bill regained consciousness. Sort of. I think regaining consciousness probably has some kind of technical definition. Some doctor would probably describe his condition as stable with periods of lucidity or something equally vague.

I don't know if the fever's broken. I think his temperature has gone down but I don't have a thermometer to check. Even if I had one I don't know what's normal. He woke for a bit this morning and croaked out for water. He's fallen asleep again, but that has to be a good sign.

I know where I can find fuel. It's not far, and I spent most of the day getting ready. The boat is good to go. There's not enough water, but we'll just have to hope for rain. There's no way I’m drinking that stuff in the river. Maybe I'll find water stored with the petrol.

I've added spare clothes, an old torch I found next to the fuse box in the beer cellar, blankets, a couple of new bags and the food. I’m going to give Bill another twenty four hours and then he has to decide. He can come with me, or continue his search for answers to questions no one cares about. Either way, I've lingered here too long.

Day 124, Riverside Links Golf Club, Oxfordshire.

06:00, 14
th
July.

I am awake. I am alive. I thought I was dead, but I was dreaming. It was a terrible dream, made worse by waking up and finding that reality is little more than a nightmare.

Kim has gone out. Water. We... I... My hand. My left hand. It's missing... You have ten fingers, how many do you really need?

I can stand. Just, and not for long. It's...

15:00, 14
th
July.

I slept. I ate. I slept a bit more. I am feeling better. I think I must have been unconscious through most of the pain. I’m just weak now. Kim found water. She says she has checked everywhere nearby. We've only six pints left. She's found a boat and knows where there is fuel. She won't say where. I checked the journal. She's been writing in it. She didn't say where in there either. Tomorrow she's going. She won't tell me where.

14
th
July – 7pm

Bill is sleeping again. I said I'd record the conversation we had this evening.

“It's a simple choice,” I told him, bluntly. “I'm going after Annette and Daisy. You can come with me or you can stay, recover and go find your answers. It's your choice, you've got to make it.”

“It's not as simple as that,” he croaked back.

“It is. I’m making it that simple. The past or the future.”

“No,” he tried to shout. “We need to destroy all trace of it. What if someone finds it... What if I’m carrying the infection, what if everyone who seems to be immune is...”

“What of it?” I snapped. “You really think that changes anything?” I picked up the map. “I found Lenham Hill. It's not far. Less than ten miles. In a few days time you'll be fit enough to walk there.”

“I...” he began. I didn't give him a chance.

“What do you make of the note? You've read it enough times. What's he apologising for?”

“I don't know. Really.”

“Do you want to know?”

“You mean you do?” he asked

“No,” I said. “I mean, is it important to you? I don't know you, Bartholomew Wright. You saved my life. I saved yours. That doesn't give us some kind of deep spiritual connection. I don't know what you want, but when I leave here, I’m going to find the girls and then I’m going to find somewhere safe for them. Somewhere safe for me too, but that isn't as important, and don't ask me why. I can't explain it. It's just how it is. So what is it you want?”

“You don't get it.”

“No. You don't. Let's say you find that those thousands of vials of virus are still there. And let's say that you find out who's responsible too. Whether it was an accident or it was on purpose, so what? Who are you going to tell? Me? Annette? Daisy, when she grows up? Do you think there could really be anything there that matters to us, to our lives? You think that knowing any of these things has anything to do with living long enough to have a life?”

“How can we do that,” Bill said, “when all the time we're just struggling to survive?”

“That's the problem,” I said, standing up. “We're not survivors, you and I, we're not looking for rescue.” I held up a hand “I've been thinking about this. I've had the time, a lot of time, whilst you've been unconscious, and we're not survivors. That's just another word for victim, and whilst we may have been victims of circumstances and whilst we both may have been victims once, we're not any more. You know what those satellite images are?” I pointed at the hard drive. “You know what they represent?”