Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest (3 page)

“Why not?” Nilda asked.

“Because a fighter plane only has so many missiles,” Tuck signed.

“How do you know this?” Nilda asked.

“I heard about it whilst I was still in the enclave,” Tuck signed. “Actually, it was part of the reason I left. There was a conversation between the deputy director of MI5 and an assistant to the Air Chief Marshal, not that they’d been in those posts the week before. They didn’t mind talking around a deaf girl. They thought that because I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t understand.”

“And what were you doing besides spying on them?” Chester asked.

“I was trying to find out where in the world might be safer than Britain,” Tuck signed. “Some other island or…” She shrugged. “Anywhere that the people in charge in the morning were the same as the ones running the place the evening before. I could tell it was all going to fall apart. And it did.”

Gloom descended with Jay’s translation of those last few words, but he broke it with a question of his own. “You said the planes crashed? But they didn’t try and move them?”

“City Airport’s built on a pontoon out into the middle of an old dock,” Chester said. “It’s surrounded by water. There’s nowhere to move them to.”

“Right, yes,” Jay said, impatient. “So the planes will still be there?”

“Yes, why?” Chester asked.

“Because I think McInery’s right,” Jay said. “If we’re going to make the Tower work, we need small boats, lots of them, and I think we’ll find those boats at the airport.”

“Well,” Chester mused, “I suppose there might be one or two left in the marina that surrounded the runway, but I doubt it. The story everywhere, and not just in the UK, but from all those people who made it to Anglesey, they all said that anything that could float was taken out to sea regardless of whether the engines worked or anyone on board knew how to furl a sail. I’d say our best bet for finding a ship would be in the Maritime Museum at Greenwich. I think they had a couple of whaling boats there. Wooden, of course, and a bit bigger than this craft, with a single sail, and which could be rowed by a crew of four. Or was it six? Actually, thinking about it, I’m not sure that was in Greenwich.”

“N’ah,” Jay said with a grin. “We don’t want a museum relic that’ll dissolve if it comes in contact with water. We want something modern, something that won’t rip or tear, and which doesn’t need diesel. We’ll find it at the airport.”

“How can you be so sure?” Nilda asked.

“There was a movie where a plane crashed onto the water and the passengers all—”

“Life rafts!” Nilda exclaimed. “Cruise ships have lifeboats. Planes have life rafts. If the airport is full of crashed planes, then it’s also full of rafts. We’ve just got to pull them out.”

“That’s actually a good idea,” Chester said. “For going up and down the river they’ll be cumbersome, but for getting over the jagged masonry around the bridges, they’ll be perfect. That material’s got to be rip proof.”

“It is?” Nilda asked.

“Well, I’m only guessing—”

“Tuck says it is,” Jay cut in. “And there might be food, too, you know. Peanuts and stuff.”

“That’s what you think is it?” Chester asked the soldier.

“No, it’s what
I
think,” Jay said. “But it’s worth looking.”

“What’s that?” Jay asked, pointing ahead of the boat.

“The Thames Barrier,” Chester said wearily. He’d started out as a cheerful tour guide, but Jay had been interrogating him incessantly as they travelled down the river. The man’s tone was now one of resigned exasperation. Tuck met Nilda’s eyes, nodded at Jay, and rolled her own. Nilda took that to mean the soldier was grateful that Jay’s barrage of questions was finally being directed at someone else.

“Okay. So what is it?” Jay asked.

“It was designed to stop London from flooding. But the barrier’s down, so the city, or parts of it, will flood,” Chester said.

“You mean like the Tower?”

“I doubt it. They started building that fortress nearly a thousand years ago, so I think it’s safe enough. But London used to be full of rivers, little tributaries that all fed the Thames. Those rivers became canals or sewers. The land around and above them became houses and offices. The river will a find a new course, basements will flood, buildings will collapse, and roads will be washed away. Soon, each time we come along the river, the skyline will be changed. The airport’s over there, on your left,” he added.

“Where? I can’t see it,” Jay said.

“No, there’s a housing estate between us and it.”

“And what’s that?” Jay asked. Nilda had to smile.

“What?” Chester asked.

“Those chimneys.” Jay pointed.

“The Tate and Lyle sugar factory,” Chester said.

“They made sugar? Really?” Curiosity was now replaced by excitement. “Shouldn’t we check it out?”

“They didn’t
make
sugar, they refined it,” Nilda said. “Without the boats coming in, there’ll be no canes to process. Any that was stored there would have been used up during the rationing. Look at those tower blocks near the factory. Think of all the people who lived there, and then remember how hungry you were before the evacuation and after. They’ll have broken in, or stormed the place en masse, taking anything that was left.”

“And licked the walls clean for good measure,” Chester added.

“But it’s right there. Surely it’s worth looking,” Jay said.

“Sugar might make life sweeter, but you can’t live on it,” Nilda said. “We have to keep focused. The Geiger counter first, and then the farms in Kent. How do we get into the airport?”

“It’s a single runway, built out onto water that forms a sort of marina,” Chester said. “Not like the ones near the Tower, there were too many security concerns to let boats come and go as they liked. Access to the marina was through a lock that we’ll get to in about five minutes, and I’m pretty sure that it was open when we passed it on our way down from Hull.”

It was. Chester had to turn the engine on to pilot the small boat through the narrow channel that led to the airport. When he switched it off, there was a brief moment of quiet, suddenly interrupted by a banging clatter from above as the undead clawed at the high-sided metal barriers of the road bridge under which they passed. Nilda scanned the quay to either side, but there were no other zombies in sight. Nevertheless, as they puttered away from the lock and bridge, and the sound slowly faded, she thought it an inauspicious start to their quest.

“And that’s the airport,” Chester whispered though the comment was unnecessary. They could all see the planes, dozens parked, others crashed with wings jutting straight up, almost like plaintive hands reaching to the sky, but their collective attention was on a tail wing sticking out of the water at the runway’s end.

“That’s a 747,” Tuck signed.

“It was a short runway,” Chester said. “They’d fly to Europe and not much further. I suppose that plane was out of fuel and had nowhere else to go. The terminal’s over there.” He pointed down the long stretch of water at the cluster of large warehouse-like buildings at the far western end of the cluttered runway.

“How close can you get the boat?” Nilda asked.

“You want to risk turning the engines on?”

“Look at how many planes there are. Fifty? A hundred? If they all came in carrying the undead, and if those zombies are still there, I’d rather know before we climb up.”

Chester turned the engine on and steered a course parallel to the runway. When he pulled the boat up against a steep set of stairs next to a series of pontoons floating lazily in the water, no undead had appeared.

“You know what a Geiger counter looks like?” Jay asked Chester as Tuck tied the boat to one of the pontoons.

“Yep,” Chester said.

“Good,” Jay said. “Then Tuck and I’ll sort out the rafts. You go and find one.”

“I think one of us should stay on the boat,” Nilda said with unsubtle subtext.

“There’s no room for passengers now, Mum.”

“You wouldn’t be a passenger,” she said. “You’d be making sure we had a safe way out.”

“Nowhere’s safe, not until we make it that way,” Jay replied. “And two teams are quicker than one, and quicker is safer.”

“Then you should come with me,” Nilda insisted.

“Chester, do you know sign language?” Jay asked.

“You know that I don’t,” he said.

“Then it’s settled. Tuck and I are a team. We’ve done this before. We’ll be fine.”

Nilda was again reminded how much her son had changed, but as much as she hated it, she knew he was right.

“Fine. Chester and I will go and find the Geiger counter. You get the rafts. We’ll be back here in… I don’t know. An hour?”

“Right. And you’ll signal if you get into trouble?” Jay asked.

“If we get into trouble,” Chester said, patting his pocket, “you’ll hear the shots.”

Wanting to skip forward to the point where she and her son were once more on the relative safety of the boat, Nilda climbed up onto the runway. She was stunned by what she saw. For five hundred metres to the east, the runway jutted out into the water. A hundred metres to the west, the site widened and spread, with windowed warehouse-like buildings ringing the landing strip in a U-shape of unequal height and depth. Going by the position of the train station on the maps she’d poured over back at the fortress, the passenger side of the airport was in the southeastern corner. On every available patch of tarmac between her and those buildings were planes. They were a mix of single engine, twin props, and jets, and all were parked wingtip to window. She recognised a few of the paint schemes as those of commercial carriers, a few more as being obviously privately owned, but most were burned and broken beyond recognition.

There was a narrow path down the centre of the runway. At first, Nilda thought that it had been deliberately left clear, but as she took another step forward, she realised that it was the result of the 747’s failed landing. Though there was still enough clearance for one of the small-winged planes to set down, the runway was so littered with charred debris that any attempt would end in a crash.

Her foot kicked against something. It skidded across the tarmac with a jangling tinkle of metal. Looking down, she saw a twisted seat buckle still attached to a few inches of singed belt. The sound brought her back to where, and when, she was. She looked and listened, but there was no sign of the undead, nor could she hear their ominous shuffling wheeze.

“Stay safe,” she said, turning to Jay. “And stay close to the boat.” She nodded to Chester, and the two of them set off at a jog towards the terminal.

Rafts

“Which plane should we start with?” Jay asked.

Tuck looked around, taking in the wreckage. “Not all planes had rafts,” she signed.

“Okay,” Jay said. “So, which ones did?”

Tuck shrugged and pointed at a twin-engine jet with a set of steps pushed up to the open door. “That one. The stairs will save us the climb.” Their presence also meant that the passengers had exited the aircraft. Tuck didn’t want to enter one of those planes and find it full of the dead, or worse, the undead. Not now, not today. She was tired, and in a way she hadn’t felt in months, not since she and Jay had first arrived at Kirkman House. Then it had been the shock of finding a group of survivors and discovering that civilisation had been reduced to a handful of people using ramshackle rooftop walkways to scavenge from the remains of a dead city. There had been a euphoric moment when they were rescued from the British Museum, compounded by seeing it was Nilda who had rescued them. That had turned to near ecstatic joy with the discovery that there were ten thousand people alive and thriving around a nuclear power plant in Wales. That had been the high point from which she’d come crashing down when she’d realised that the fifty of them in the Tower of London were probably the second largest community left on the planet. Anglesey and London, the last bastions of humanity, and each week their numbers shrank, the struggle for survival grew harder, and the only end to it that she could see was death.

She glanced at Jay, forced a smile, and planted a weary foot on the plane’s steps. She froze. Something was wrong. Slowly, she turned around. It wasn’t just exhaustion, not this time. She’d had this feeling before, though in a very different city, facing a very different threat. It was the sense that despite everything appearing deserted, they were surrounded.

Again she looked at Jay. He saw her expression and knew without being told that danger was close. He twisted his head left and right, listening, then tilted it to one side, squinting in a way that reminded her of a cat looking at a mouse that wouldn’t run away.

“Not zombies,” he signed.

She was about to berate him for being imprecise when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of movement through one of the cabin windows. Most of the shades had been pulled down, but three near the dirt-encrusted wing were half open. There. She saw it again. Something green, but moving too fast to identify any more detail than that. She grabbed Jay’s arm and pulled him behind her. He stumbled down the steps as she raised her axe.

Before she could signal to him to back away, a small bird with bright green plumage shot out of the open door. Then there was another. And a third, and then, all at once, a great mass of flapping wings as a green wave exploded out of the plane and up into the sky.