Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland (27 page)

“Yes, of course,” he said bitterly. “That I could have stopped it. That I wasn't just responsible for the evacuation, for the murder of millions of Britons, but of millions others besides. Billions, all over the world.”

“NO!” I shouted. “If it means anything it's the complete opposite. It's proof that you were a cog in all the manipulative machinations of some master Machiavellian. You weren't any more important to the grand scheme of things than I was, and that doesn't matter any more. We're not captives to that old world order. We're not survivors, we survived. That part of our lives is over. It's the next part, what we do with it, that's what's important now.” I subsided a little. “Sanders, Liz, Chris, even Cannock, they were survivors. They got so far, and that was it. Their worlds became nothing more than getting by day to day. Just dragging existence out for a few more years, one day at a time. That's no more a life than what I had in that cell.” I sat down and picked up the rifle.

“Look at us,” I said, hefting the rifle. “Look at this, what we are now,
who
we are. We're the barbarians inside the gates, alright. If you go out and find the who and why and how of it all, that's not going to turn back the clock. The undead aren't going away. You can look for your answers, you can spend your whole life doing it, and maybe you can even find them, but the world is going to keep on turning, indifferent to you and all that you find.”

He was silent for a while.

“We'll have to go far away, somewhere no one recognises me,” he said, finally.

“So you're coming with me?”

He didn't say anything for a long while.

“The way Barrett and the others looked at me...”

“You should have said who you were to start with. Or, yes, made up some lie about what happened, or better yet, burnt that journal. But it's too late for any of that now. You want to come with me, or not?”

“The future or the past, that's the choice, is it?” he paused again. “Where are we getting the fuel?”

“You need to say it. I need you to say it, and I need to know you mean it. I’m serious. There's no turning back. If we stumble across some of those answers on the way, then that's fine with me, but we're not looking for them. We've one job. Find the girls and get them somewhere safe. Yes?”

“Yes,” he said. “We'll find them. We'll take them somewhere safe.” He paused for a moment, and then smiled. “Manipulative machinations of some master Machiavellian? How long did you spend working on that one?” Then I smiled too.

“So, where are we getting the fuel?” he asked.

“Easy,” I said. “Lenham Hill. That's why I needed you to say it out loud.”

Day 125, Riverside Links Golf Club, Oxfordshire.

06:45, 15
th
July.

“I make it a bit less than ten miles to Lenham, according to that map,” Kim said, this morning.

“Let me see?” I asked. “Well there's no direct route. I make it about fifteen, assuming that none of the roads are blocked.”

“We're going in a straight line. Over the golf course, then down the train line. That brings us to within a kilometre. We'll see what the land is like there. Maybe we can drive up close. Or we walk.”

“You're certain there's fuel there?”

“No. There was a whole load of manifests and supply documents. They got a lot petrol delivered. Diesel too. Just before the outbreak. We're talking tankers of the stuff, and since it was an MOD place I can't see it being requisitioned.”

“But what if it was? Or if there are people there, like you said, out of all the places in the world, this one is...”

“Then I've got the addresses of a three car showrooms within a couple of miles of it.” She cut in. “We'll find some fuel somewhere.”

“It's a long shot,” I said.

“It's better than just sitting around here.” And that was it. The matter was settled.

My next question was more practical. “How are we going to drive there, without fuel?”

“Golf carts.”

“Golf carts?”

“What else do you expect to find at a golf club? I reckon they were designed to go up and down at least ten miles of grass without being recharged. So two batteries should see us there and back. I've found us four. They're easy enough to change over and when they run out, we dump them. Satisfied?”

I wasn't. I’m still not. I feel exposed sitting out here, waiting for her to finish loading up the rest of the supplies. At least a golf cart should be silent, and since I can't walk, what other choice do we have?

09:45, 15
th
July.

The cart is quiet. It's no faster than walking, particularly on the uneven ground of the golf course. There's something farcical about all of this. I’m sitting by the train tracks, watching Kim push the golf cart up the embankment. Even the undead on the golf course, unable to move far with their crushed limbs, heard us coming, but They couldn't even crawl towards us. They could only let out a low moan as we went by. Yes, this is almost funny.

We're just going for the fuel. I had to agree to that again. If the place is abandoned, if it seems safe, and if there's time, then we might search for information on the virus and we may try and destroy the facility. But only if there's time. Kim's right. Annette and Daisy come first. The past can wait.

11:15, 15
th
July.

We've stopped about a mile from Lenham Hill. Kim has gone on to scout ahead. We saw a strange sign, a “road closed” sign, with the word “zombies” scrawled over it. We've hardly seen any of the undead since we left the train line. We had to deal with a couple when we went through a tunnel. Rather, Kim had to deal with Them whilst I just sat and watched.

There's something sinister about those signs. Kim has gone to check, just in case.

Day 125, Lenham Hill, Oxfordshire.

20:00, 15
th
July.

“Three zombies. Already dead,” Kim said when she returned. “Shot. And there were another two signs, just like the first, each in the middle of a road.”

“We can't go back,” I said. We'd discussed it when the first battery died, a mile along the railway line. We'd discussed it again when the second ran out when we were in the middle of the tunnel. Now, only a mile away from Lenham Hill, we'd just swapped in the fourth and final battery.

“I think we can make about four miles,” Kim said. “Whoever shot those zombies, whoever left those signs, if they're still around here, then four miles isn't going to get us far enough away.”

“We need the fuel, then.”

We left the cart in an otherwise anonymous terrace at the edge of a cricket club, and with Kim holding me up, walked the last thousand yards or so into a small copse, overlooking Lenham Hill.

“There's no hill,” Kim said.

“No, well, that's the point,” I said. “Second World War mentality. Disinformation dragged forward into the Cold War. It's just another old airfield, long sold off to a private company, at least as far as anyone else might suspect.”

“It was an old radar station?”

“Sort of. During the war it was an airfield, then a staging post for commando raids then, after the war, it became the site of one of the post-nuclear communication centres. It was part of a string of bunkers across the country, linked by underground cables. A sort of pre-Internet post-apocalyptic communications system. You have to remember that Britain was broke after the war, so the sites they picked were chosen purely on where there was an existing underground facility. Then the bombs got bigger. These places became obsolete and were mothballed. Or that's what I thought.”

She levelled the rifle and peered through the scope. “I can see a hanger, an old red-brick, and a couple of newer office type buildings. Where's the bunker?”

“At a guess? The concrete hut where the two landing strips intersect,” I replied.

“It looks deserted. I don't like that.”

“You'd rather you could see machine gun nests and searchlights at every corner?” I asked.

“No, I mean, if someone's going out and shooting the undead, then there should be some kind of sign of life about this place.”

“You're assuming that whoever shot those zombies came from here. They could be somewhere in the town or one of the villages around here, or it could have been someone passing through any time in the last few months,” I said.

“I can't see anyone down there,” she said, ignoring me.

“The kind of people who'd be stationed there would be good at not being seen,” I said. Suddenly, Kim leapt up and turned around.

“What is it?” I asked, startled, as I turned around whilst I scrabbled in my pocket for the pistol.

She smiled. “Sorry. It's just that if this was a film, that's the bit where some grizzled sergeant appears out of the darkness and points a gun at you.”

I tried not to laugh. I failed. The absurdity of the situation was too much. “Time's against us. You want to risk going down there?”

“Try the hanger first. That's our best bet.”

The hanger was empty, at least of fuel. Most of the space was given over to a partly dismantled prop-plane. Sections of engine had been taken apart and arrayed along a series of now dusty work benches. If I hadn't known what was under our feet I would have taken it to be an entirely legitimate, if close to bankrupt, business.

We went round the other buildings, checking the walls for any sign of some underground fuel storage tank. We found nothing. Then, we turned towards the concrete hut in the middle of the airfield. Both of us wanting to get it over with, we headed towards the bunker.

We didn't see the scorch marks until we reached the doorway. A few fragments of burnt wood hung limply from a frame that was no longer hiding the steep steps leading down to a stout, reinforced, metal door.

“We're not going to find any fuel down there,” I said.

“I know,” Kim replied.

“We can go,” I suggested. “Just get the cart as far as we can, search the cars, find fuel that way, or...”

“I think it might be too late for that. Look up,” she said.

I did. Above us, over the doorway, was a camera. It swivelled one way, then the other. Then the door clicked open.

We could have left. Of course we could. We didn't. We just looked at one another and shrugged. Somehow, in that same strange way that I knew I had to climb into that window at the Manor, that same luck that landed me with a broken leg during the outbreak, the same instinct that had kept me alive when billions had perished, it was all telling me that, despite every appearance to the contrary, it was going to be OK.

Nevertheless, I checked that the pistol was still in my pocket. I took out the torch, but then had to wait an infuriatingly embarrassing few seconds for Kim to twist the end so that the light would come on. It is so maddening the simple everyday things that require two working hands!

The torch illuminated a narrow staircase that descended a dozen steps before ending in a short landing.

“You think you can make it on your own?” Kim asked.

“I can try.” I replied. She nodded, and raised the rifle in front of her.

We were half way down when we heard the door shut behind us.

“Figures,” Kim said.

At the landing, we turned the corner and found another staircase. We kept going down, staircase to landing to staircase, about seventy feet in total, and I was exhausted when we finally reached the bottom. We were standing in front of a steel door that resembled an airlock from a submarine. It was hanging loosely by one hinge. Whether it was there to keep something in or to keep it out, it had clearly failed.

“What if whatever's down there isn't human?” Kim asked

“The door up there clicked open and closed,” I said, still trying to catch my breath.

“That's not very reassuring,” she muttered, pushing the door aside, and stepping through.

We walked into a reception area. There were no pot plants, no magazines, no chairs except one behind the solitary desk. Beneath the desk was a computer tower unit, shattered and ruined by an unmistakable bullet hole.

“This is getting...” Kim began, but didn't finish the sentence. Opposite the door we had come through was another pressure door, its hinges broken like the first. She pushed it open and we stepped into a long corridor.

I played the torch up and down and across its sides. “No light fittings,” I muttered. “Nothing but nozzles. Probably part of a fire suppression system,” I said. Then I remembered what it was we might find here, and I realised what kind of systems might be in place and what those nozzles might dispense.

“Sightseeing later,” Kim said, and we hurried on, through another broken door and into a wider corridor. The torch wasn't powerful enough to make out anything more than shadows at the far end, about two hundred yards away. As I looked, I saw that the corridor had once been a large rectangular chamber, subdivided and partitioned into individual work spaces.

I glanced into the one closest to the door. There were computers, with similar matching bullet holes, screens, a light-desk and a cabinet, but my attention was taken by the bullet holes in the wall. Two, close together, at head height, surrounded by a horrible red smear.