“What about other people. Did you see other people?” she cut in.
“Oh, there were some. Not many to start with. Most waited in their homes, blithely obeying their instructions. Ha! Sleepwalking unto death, they go—”
“Seb! On the evacuation, what happened?”
“On the evacuation? Nothing.” He took a breath, and gathered his thoughts. “It was just a long walk. And it has been a long time since I walked those types of distances. And I’ve never walked anywhere without knowing what my destination might be.”
“I thought the Muster Point was meant to be about ten miles away,” Jay said, speaking gently before his mother gave another abrupt interjection.
“And that they’d take us by train or bus up to an enclave in the far north of Scotland? Yes, so did I,” Sebastian replied. “Well, that was a lie, too. I walked, and I kept walking and I really put everything I had into it. I thought if I got there first I’d be on one of the first trains and so amongst the first to arrive at the enclave. I hoped I might be there early enough to volunteer for some easier work detail. But after two hours, I’d covered more than ten miles and hadn’t arrived anywhere. By then, I was no longer alone. People were streaming up the side roads onto the Motorway. I kept on; what else could I do? I asked a few people where we were going, but no one knew, and no one really wanted to talk. Having slowed when I thought I was nearing my destination, I found I couldn’t speed up again. My energy was gone. If I were a younger man… but if I was, then I would now be dead.”
He raised the spoon, dropped it, and pushed the bowl away.
“I’d been near the front, or at least in front of anyone else from here. As weariness took its inexorable hold, those who’d opted for a more sensible pace, those who’d indulged in a proper last night’s sleep, began to overtake me. Some were on bicycles and some were on foot. I even saw a few who were running. Didn’t they use to say jogging was bad for your health? Ha!” He sniffed. “By mid-afternoon, I was nearer the back than the front and perhaps fifteen miles from here. Perhaps more. I’m not sure…” he trailed off. Nilda gave her son a look, prompting him to be the one to ask something to keep the older man talking.
“Did you see anyone you knew?” Jay asked.
“Knew? A handful. And some I recognised but couldn’t name. Few spared me a second glance, and none spared me a word. Certainly no one came to my aid. And then there were too many people to spare the time to look around. For a while, it was all I could do just to avoid walking in to the back of someone or trip over the feet of someone else. It was strange, not at all the way that I thought people would act. There was no camaraderie, just this nearly tangible focus on getting to the destination. There was a woman, an old woman, far older than I. She had a little shopping cart, you know the two-wheeled kind with a tartan pattern? One of the wheels had come off, but she was resolutely dragging it along. That scraping rasp cut through the noise of stamping feet and through my exhaustion. I helped her as best I could, and as much to have that noise cease than out of any sense of duty. And that slowed me even more. She’d been on the evacuation route for four hours and had only managed three miles. She just wouldn’t give up that trolley. Nor would she tell me what was inside. It was heavy, mind you, and clinked a bit. Not as though metal was rubbing against metal, but that softer tinkle of delicate china.”
“Why’d she bring that?” Jay asked.
“As I said, she wouldn’t tell me. Not directly. But I think she, and others, they took what was important to them, not that which would be vital to their immediate survival. It was ever thus. Around four o’clock, an Army half-track started making its way along the northbound lane, travelling in a direction opposite to us lambs. They were blaring out a message over their speakers, telling the slower people to get into the left-hand lane, the faster into the right. I waved to the vehicle, trying to get their attention. I thought they had ignored me. Certainly they gave no indication they’d noticed our plight. Yet a few minutes later, perhaps ten, perhaps twenty, a string of lorries came up the road behind us. They were picking up the stragglers, you see, and one of them stopped for the old lady. They took her, but not me.”
“Didn’t you want to go with them?” Jay asked.
“I did. They asked if I could still walk. I said ‘yes.’ In which case, they said, that was what I had to do. I kept on. Night was starting to draw in. I didn’t check the time. I didn’t want to know how long I’d been walking, not when there was seemingly no end in sight. It must have been after six. I’d just gone through Carlisle, but there was hardly anyone behind, nor in front. I was almost alone, walking at a near crawl. I sat down by the roadside to rest. It wasn’t long before another vehicle came up. Again, I asked for a ride, and again I was turned down. They told me, no, they
ordered
me to keep going. They said there was no room. I could see that there was. But you know, ultimately, it was their spite that saved me. And I did get the location of the Muster Point out of them. It was five miles east of Gretna. On the border between England and Scotland,” he added in response to Jay’s blank expression. “The route left the motorway just a mile further on from where I’d stopped. So it was ten miles walking by road, or six if I went in a straight line. I continued walking, but only until the vehicle was out of sight. Then I left the road.”
“I thought you said the road was walled in.”
“It was, but there were gaps. Sometimes it was barricaded with concrete, cement, and double-thick chain-wire fence. But they clearly hadn’t enough of it. Every few hundred yards the impregnable wall would stop, the gap filled with riot-barriers or rolls of chicken wire. It was easy enough to get out. I’d passed a sign for a lay-by. It was a truck stop, not much more than a wide stretch of asphalt large enough for lorries to park up when they reached their daily maximum number of driveable hours. There were no trucks there, but there was a food van and a couple of portable toilets. I broke into the van, closed the door behind me, and sat on the floor. I’d only planned on staying there a few minutes, just long enough to boil up the last of my water and make some tea—”
“Seriously?” Jay blurted. “You were going to use the last of your water to make tea?”
“Of course. You wouldn’t understand. It’s the comfort of familiar ritual. But I didn’t make the tea. I fell asleep. When I woke it was half past ten. And, no, I didn’t then bother with the tea. I just drank the water and headed back up to the road. In my earlier exhaustion I’d not really thought about all those abandoned bicycles. There was at least one every four hundred yards, discarded when some part had broken. I found one with a punctured tyre near the gap in the fence. I dragged it along on one wheel for about three hundred yards until I came to another bike, this one with a broken chain. About five minutes after that I had a working bicycle. I left the evacuation route and cycled down the country lanes. There was a shortcut I knew that would get me to the Muster Point, and outside of a good meal, before the hour was out.”
“They didn’t stop you?” Nilda asked.
“At that point there was no one to even try. There were no police cars. No military vehicles. No evacuees. I didn’t pass a single soul nor did I see a solitary light, not until I was about a mile from my destination. I was on one of those single-lane farm-tracks, and I’d thought I’d become lost. It’s been a few years since I was able to spend my summers doing nothing but hiking around the border, but those old roads, they’ve been there for centuries. I wasn’t lost. I ended up exactly where I wanted to be. Through a gap in the hedgerow, and across the fields, I saw the lights. I knew it was the Muster Point but, for some reason, that knowledge wasn’t reassuring. I left the bicycle there and tramped across the corrugated earth. It wasn’t easy. The only light was coming from ahead of me. Perhaps because of that, because I was concentrating so much on where to put my feet, I didn’t become aware of the noise until I was clambering over a fence about a quarter of a mile from it.”
“It was loud?” Jay asked.
“No. That was the point. It should have been loud, but it wasn’t. There was just the gentle hum of generators mixed with the harsh growl of heavy-duty engines. There should have been the crying and groaning and growling of thousands of frustrated refugees. I couldn’t hear a single voice. I grew cautious. I continued on more slowly, keeping my head down, my shoulders hunched, following the fences and hedges until I was close enough to see. It was a camp. Searchlights mounted on towers of scaffolding picked out the road they’d used as the evacuation route. They must have been funnelling people in from both directions onto a slip road that led down into farmland. This slip road was split into two lanes, and each of those split again and again, each time the pathway down which the evacuees could walk became narrower and narrower. The fenced-in paths snaked up and down and back on themselves forming a horrific maze until, when the paths were so narrow that the people would be walking in single file, they reached the front and a row of desks. There was no one sitting behind them. I think that must have been where the evacuees were sorted and given the vaccine because a few dozen yards further on there was another row of barriers. These were far less intimidating, just the kind they used for crowd control at sports matches. You know the sort? About five feet high with a wide base, but designed to be knocked over if the weight behind them became too great. It looked like they had been moved around so that the evacuees could be directed into different walled-off enclosures. When one was full, the barriers would be moved so the next enclosure could be filled. And those walled-off enclosures, there were dozens of those still standing, but I couldn’t see inside from where I stood. Their walls were too high. I crept closer, to an old spreading oak jutting out at the edge of a field. I had to climb it to see inside.” He coughed. “I mean that I had to see. I had to know. To do that, I had to climb a tree. Inside those walls were bodies. Hundreds upon hundreds. All the evacuees…” he trailed off.
“Seb, it’s alright, if you don’t want to—”
“No, it is important you know. The evacuees weren’t shot. Either it was the vaccine itself or some biological weapon. I don’t suppose it matters which. Those people had gone seeking safety. They had trusted the government, and they had been betrayed. And there was nothing I could do. I just stayed up that tree watching and trying to understand how it all came to pass. How the soldiers and the police could have let it happen.”
“Does that mean they knew?” Jay asked. “That the government planned all this?”
“Wait, I haven’t finished. But, yes, someone had planned for something. Those signs, the fences, and all those spare military uniforms, it all suggests that they were preparing for some truly terrible act. Whether it was for this exact eventuality or not is immaterial. They saw the danger and came up with an elegantly savage solution. The ranks of the undead grow when people are infected. And the undead are hard to kill, but people are not, so the easiest way of reducing the number of zombies on our island is to kill the population before it turns. It is elegant, and simple and the purest evil. The noise I’d heard, that was the sound of bulldozers toppling the walls down onto the bodies. I watched as this pair of uniformed thugs sprayed something onto them. It was some type of incendiary. They lit it. And then, by the light of the pyre, I saw how many people were there. Including those in the vehicles and the two in the Towers, there were less than two-dozen personnel. I won’t call them soldiers, because that’s a disservice to those who… but I’m getting to that part. My world was in ruins. Everything I knew and believed had been torn from me. I was still in that tree, frozen with shock. I saw some people, more refugees, approaching along the road. Perhaps they had left later in the day so as to avoid the crowds. It was the person in the watchtower who spotted them first. He shouted a warning. An office on the ground called out an order. The man in the watchtower started arguing with him, whilst four others broke off from their clean-up duties and ran towards the evacuees. They stopped about twenty yards from the refugees, unslung their rifles, and opened fire. They killed them all, and there were children in that group. Children! The oldest couldn’t have been more than eight. Before the firing had stopped, the soldier in the watchtower had started climbing down. The moment his feet touched the ground, the officer in charge shot him in the head.”
Nilda glanced at Jay. He was staring at the older man with horrified disbelief. She gripped her son’s hand, tightly.
“I stayed up in that tree all night,” Sebastian said. “I suppose it was shock, but I was concealed well enough. When dawn came the thugs left, leaving nothing but smouldering ashes. I climbed down and again felt compelled to see. I walked in to the killing field. I’m glad I did. Mixed in with the bodies of the old and young and civilian, were uniforms. Dozens of them. Who exactly they were, I don’t know. Nor who gave the orders for them to be shot. But whoever it was, not everyone blindly followed them. I found some strength in that. I wandered there for a while, trying to burn those images into my soul. But the body is weak. Thirst forced me to leave. I went back to the bicycle and began looking for some stream or brook. I was so filled with anger I made no effort to conceal myself, but I saw no one for the remainder of the day. That anger was my undoing, however. I should have been back here that night. Instead, I ended up lost. By nightfall, I was at least thirty miles north of the border. Ah!” He raised his hand to forestall a comment from Jay. “There’s one more thing. Perhaps the most important part. Yesterday, was it yesterday or was it the day before? The reason it took me so long to come back; I saw the undead. There were three of them walking along the road towards me. I turned around. They followed. I lost them, but I had to detour three more times. The closest of these creatures was twenty miles away, but that’s still too close. They will come. There is nothing to stop them.”