Surviving The Evacuation (Book 4): Unsafe Haven (23 page)

Occasionally he glanced behind to make sure the undead were following, but mostly he kept his eyes on the road in front. Zombies moved towards him, their arms raised, ready to claw, their open mouths readying to bite. He ducked, he dodged, he dived. He didn’t run. He kept walking, leading the undead away.

And that worked for nearly half a mile, until he turned a corner and found two-dozen zombies clustered around an abandoned post-office van. He turned around, and found twice that number following him a few dozen yards behind. That was when he started to run. But on every road there were more and more of the undead. And then he found the road ahead full of so many that he couldn’t get past. He turned around, but the road behind was no better. In desperation he kicked down the nearest door, hastily throwing up a barricade as he looked around. He was in a coffee shop a few days away from being opened. He found his way to the back. Zombies filled the road outside. He was trapped. At least there was food. And it wouldn’t be long before the creatures dispersed, he thought. He sat down to wait. Minutes turned to hours, then to days.

17
th
April

For the thousandth time, he peered through the window, eyeing the silent undead outside, measuring his chances if he just tried to run through them. Suddenly one near a side road stood, and started to move away. And then another. And another. Soon they were all moving, shoving and pushing and walking into one another as they headed towards… he didn’t know what and it didn’t matter. They were leaving and that meant he could escape. He could rescue the broken-legged man. For Chester, after days of reflection, that was all that now mattered.

He waited a few more hours before leaving. He crept when he could, ran when he couldn’t, and finally reached the Crystal Palace transmitter. The car was still where he’d left it. McInery hadn’t sent anyone to check on it or him. He got in and drove down the hill to the house of the broken-legged man. He pulled the car to a halt in the street outside and went into the house.

“Hey! Are you here! Where are you!” he bellowed as he ran from room to room, but the house was empty. The man had gone. Might he have left a note? There wasn’t time to check. Through a window from a small room at the top of the house he saw the undead moving down the street towards the car. He ran back downstairs and outside but hesitated before getting back in the car. He had done everything he could. He had come back for the man and he’d looked for him, but he was gone. Chester didn’t want to leave. He had been certain his future was tied to the man with the broken leg, but the undead were getting closer. There was no more time. He got back in the car and drove away from London.

Part 4: Raft

Isle of Scaragh, North Atlantic

1
st
July

She was still alive. More than that, she felt well. Fish and crab and fresh air had done wonders to her physique. Her clothes, which had been tattered after the wreck, were now becoming ragged. They wouldn’t survive much longer, but appearances meant little. Whenever she looked in the small mirror, taken from the wrecked lifeboat, she didn’t see her own tort skin, but the ravaged face of the Abbot in those last moments before she filled in his grave. She didn’t look in the mirror often.

She was alive. She had reconciled herself to that, though it had been hard. During those first few weeks she had done little more than wait to die and think of her son. She had finally allowed herself to mourn. Entire days were spent lost in grief, yet hunger and thirst would always bring her out of it. And as time had gone by, she found she no longer wanted to die. As more time passed, she found that she wanted to live.

She sat down on the beach to stare out at the waves. She no longer expected the undead to come, nor feared them if they did.

She knew she couldn’t stay on the island. Whilst she had become adept at catching crabs and fish, there were fewer nettles to go with them and the roots she found were ever smaller. If she wanted to live, she had to escape. And she did want to live. But why?

That question had been troubling her for the last couple of weeks. There was something someone had said or not said, or done or left undone. Between the evacuation and her arrival on the island, every moment had been filled with action and then despair. It was only now that she had time to think.

She stared at the waves. Then at her hands. Then at her arms. The teeth marks were still visible. Then she knew.

If she was immune, then wouldn’t Jay be immune? Wasn’t there at least a chance that she’d passed on to him whatever it was that had kept her safe? And with that realisation she was consumed with angry guilt at her own self-pitying arrogance. The Abbot had been right. Guilt had caused her to pursue revenge when she should have gone back to look for her son.

She had to leave the island. She stood up and walked down into the waves. She had waded chest deep before reason returned. She couldn’t swim across the sea. She would need a boat. She waded back towards shore, angling towards the lifeboat. She clambered up onto the rocks it was still pinned to. First outside, then inside, she examined the sharp-toothed gash in the hull. She peered out to sea, then at the boat, the shore, the hut, and the island, searching for inspiration in how to seal it. Reluctantly, she admitted what she had known from that first morning on the island; the boat was a wreck. It would never float again. But she had to go back to the mainland. She had to try. With difficulty, she quelled the nihilistic impulse to try and swim. She would drown. She knew it. That would serve no purpose. There had to be another way. But what? She turned away from the ocean and looked back at the shore, and saw the cairn she’d built over the graves.

She had suggested a raft to the Abbot, hadn’t she? He’d said it took nails and rope and that there were none on the island. But how would he know? He hadn’t had time to travel further than between the hut and the graves. She began an inventory of all the materials she could find.

3
rd
July

At first, it had come to very little. In her mind she saw rafts as she had on the television; tree trunks held together by rope. She’d tried sawing through a pine with the serrated edge of the spade. After an hour’s effort she’d done little more than graze the bark. As for rope, the Abbot had been correct. There really wasn’t any on the island. She’d considered digging up the bodies, stripping the clothing from them, unravelling the thread, and then braiding it together. But she only considered it briefly. It was something that would take months of labour. There wasn’t the time. Not anymore. Not if Jay might be alive.

She’d subdued her frustration and turned her attention back to her surroundings. There was nothing of use on the island save the jetty, the hut, the wreck of the boat, and the detritus coating the beach.

5
th
July

She eyed the roof of the hut. It was made of two flat sections that met at an angle of thirty degrees, affixed to the walls.

“Bolted on, it looks like,” she murmured. But the walls were twelve feet high. She needed a way of climbing up to examine them properly. It took her another hour of staring at the collection of junk on the beach and wandering around the hut before she saw what was in front of her eyes; the bunk beds. They were metal framed, screwed into the floor and walls. It took the rest of the day to detach the bunks and drag them outside.

The next morning, as soon as it was light, she clambered up to examine the roof. There were brackets under the eaves, bolting the roof to the walls. Someone had made a half-hearted effort to seal the bolts in plastic, but salt-water had found its way in and done its work. Most of the bolts were rusted into their sockets. Having no wrench she had to hit them loose with a rock. By nightfall, with her hands bloody from where she’d missed, the bolts were finally loose. She collapsed by the fire and slept.

6
th
July

She was up before dawn, and up on her improvised scaffolding soon after. She had a plan. She’d take the roof off, then take down the walls and reassemble the hut upside down on the beach. The walls could be trimmed to a height of about five feet with the serrated edge of the collapsible spade; she’d practiced on a section by the doorway and found it was easy to cut. She had no illusions about the boat she was creating, but it only needed it to float for a few hours over a few miles. That wasn’t too much to ask. She hoped.

Slowly, she made her way around the roof, removing the bolts, carefully placing them in the now empty first aid kit; she would need them later. In half an hour she was ready. She just had to slide the roof off towards the beach. Gravity would do the rest.

The sea breeze had become familiar to the point where she ignored it. She didn’t notice that the wind had picked up until she’d slid the roof out three feet from the wall. A gust came in, entered the gap, and picked up the roof, spinning it over her head. She reached up in a futile attempt to grab it. Unbalanced, she fell, her improvised scaffolding toppling on top of her. She tasted blood, and something else. A tooth. She spat it out.

For a long minute she lay unmoving, unblinking, doing nothing but breathing slowly through gritted teeth. When she tried to stand, she found she had a long shallow gash on her leg. Dripping blood onto the wooden walkway, she ignored the pain as she limped along to the end of the jetty. The roof did float and was now fifty yards out to sea.

10
th
July

With a grunt of effort she dragged the hut wall down the beach to the water’s edge. She’d had to wait until the cut on her leg had scabbed over - she didn’t want to risk an infection and all that would mean. She got an edge of the wall out into the water. No, she realised with relief, onto the water. It floated. She pushed it further out until it was bobbing freely up and down on the waves, then she clambered on top. It sank. She had half expected that. It didn’t matter. The principal was what counted. The walls would float. She’d be able to cut them into shape and… she wasn’t sure. But she could work it out. She would work it out. She rolled off the prefab and into the shallows. She waited, expecting the wall to bob up out of the water. It didn’t. She grabbed it, and dragged it back to shore. It was sodden, soaked through. She had assumed it was made of wood, or at least of fibreboard. It wasn’t. Sandwiched between thin layers of waterproof laminate was a compressed mixture of cloth and paper. Water had seeped in through the exposed edges turning the interior into nothing firmer than papier-mâché.

15
th
July

A squall the night before had soaked the now exposed hut. The three remaining walls had soaked up the water and then collapsed shortly after dawn. Nilda sat on the jetty, staring forlornly out at sea. She had reconciled herself to death, but now that she had the smallest glimmer of hope on which to grasp, she found her every attempt frustrated. The only things of use in the remains of the hut, like the folding chairs and tables, were made of metal. Metal didn’t float. Not easily, and not in any sense that was meaningful to her. Idly, her hand reached out to pluck an errant splinter from the jetty. She held it up. Then she looked down at the wooden jetty and she laughed.

18
th
July

Pulling out the nails holding the wooden planking of the jetty to their supports had been time consuming. She’d had to wear down a groove next to each nail and then carefully lever it out. In her eagerness, she’d lost two to the sea. But now she had a stack of planks, and a neat pile of nails.

“So what’s next?” she asked the empty beach.

21
st
July

She had nailed the planks together, one layer underneath, the other on top, each layer holding the other in place. It was time for a test. The raft floated, not on the waves, but a few inches below them.

“That’s good enough to get out of the bay, isn’t it?” she muttered as she dragged the raft back on to the beach. “Yes. Yes. It is. But that’s not going to be good enough. No. Not good enough. What’s missing? Sides! I need sides!”

She looked about for other materials. She could see none. Biting down her frustration she began another long walk around the island. She followed the cliff edge, peering down to the rocks below in the hope something might have been washed onto them. There was nothing. She went inland and scoured the forest floor, and then she returned to the ruins of the boat, going over it again and again. But she had done that many times and, when night fell, was unsurprised that her search had once again come to naught.

22
nd
July

She threw another branch onto the fire. It was important to keep the bonfire blazing. There was only a slim chance anyone would see it. Slim chances were all she had. She stared at the raft. There was nothing on the island, nothing to make sides except the wooden jetty itself.

“Then make it smaller,” she said. “Use the planks to make the sides.”

Slowly, methodically, not allowing herself to give in to anger at herself for not realising the obvious earlier, she took her raft apart.

24
th
July

Raft Mark-Two was much smaller than the first, but it had sides. She took it out to the shallows. It sank a few inches, but for a moment she stayed dry. Then the water began to seep through the gaps. Wet and miserable, frustrated with yet another setback, she dragged her raft back to shore.

“Tar, that’s what the Navy used, wasn’t it? Didn’t they used to call sailors ‘Jack-Tars’? Well that’s what I need,” she muttered. “But how do you make tar. It’s a by-product of oil, right? And that doesn’t help me at all. What else could I use? Beeswax? There aren’t hives on the island.” She had looked.

She growled in anger. She had tried screaming, but that had done nothing more than leave her throat raw.

“Tar. Oil. Wax. Rubber,” she muttered to herself as she slowly turned in a circle, trying to see the obvious that she’d so far missed. Then she saw it.

“Plastic.”

There was enough of it on the beach, though less than when they’d run aground. She’d taken to collecting it, piling it up in the tumbledown house. It had given her something to do.

She grabbed a handful from the beach, sorting it, finding the pieces she thought large enough. Then she banked up the fire, moved the raft close to it, and began melting the plastic onto the gaps.

The first piece caught in her hands, burning onto her fingers. She ran down to the sea, plunging the hand into the waves. She had to peel the melted plastic off her hand, taking a layer of skin with it. For some reason she found that funny.

She tried again, this time laying the plastic in place and holding out a burning branch from the fire close to it. It worked. She felt she’d proved the principal. How long the seal would hold, or how effective it would be, she wouldn’t know until she tested it. And she couldn’t do that until she’d sealed at least most of the gaps.

25
th
July

It began to rain. The fire went out.

31
st
July

She’d had to wait for the rain to stop and the raft to dry out, but she’d sealed about three quarters of the raft. She was impatient. She didn’t want to wait. Three quarters was enough, she decided, at least for a test. She took it out to the shallows. It worked. Mostly. When she dragged the raft back to the shore she found a quarter of the plastic had simply washed away. She used up one more of the precious few matches to relight the fire. As she waited for the flames to take, she gathered more plastic from the house. Then she realised that the raft was too wet. Again, she would have wait until the wood had dried.