Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest (4 page)

She ducked, the movement involuntary and unnecessary. The birds came nowhere near them. A smile crept slowly across her scarred face. The tension that had been plaguing her dissipated as the flock, perhaps a hundred-strong, flew up to circle the aircraft above them.

“Are they parrots?” Jay asked.

Tuck had no idea. “Probably,” she signed.

“Did they come on the plane?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. But there’s a lesson here.” She pointed at the white and black stained wing. “We were so busy looking for the undead we didn’t see what was immediately in front of us. Guano.”

“And so busy looking at it now, that we don’t realise what’s
not
in there,” Jay said. “No zombies, and now there are no birds. Come on.”

He pushed past her and ducked into the cabin. She followed. As soon as she stepped inside, her nose tried to shut down as it was assaulted by a foul stench. She gritted her teeth and turned on her flashlight. It, like most of the torches the group used, was a wind-up LED model, originally part of a window display at an electrical shop near Farringdon. It wasn’t bright, but it added texture to a cabin otherwise only illuminated through the open door and a few half-closed window shades. There was a tug at her arm.

“Where’s the raft?” Jay signed.

Even in the gloom his expression was clear, the reason for it obvious. She grinned.

“Don’t like the smell?” she signed.

“It’s pretty…” he began, but couldn’t find the word.

“Acrid?” she signed. He just shrugged. “Try underneath those seats there.”

There were two rafts, both untouched since their last safety inspection.

“Where do they keep the peanuts?” Jay asked as they dropped the second raft onto the tarmac.

Tuck glanced at the birds. Most were still circling overhead, but a few had come to land on the wing and fuselage. They were as good as a guard dog when it came to the undead. She pointed Jay towards the rear of the plane whilst she headed to the cockpit.

The cabinet marked with that familiar red cross was empty, but she wasn’t looking for a first-aid kit. As she had looked about the plane, an idea had come to her. It was only half formed, and the obstacles to it actually working were so great that she almost dismissed it as one of those idle fantasies that came whenever she saw a piece of old world technology.

She bent over the captain’s seat, then the co-pilot’s, and then examined the control panel and the floor, finding nothing but a couple of shreds of paper. The rest, along with any other clue as to the plane’s point of departure, had become building material for the birds that had turned the aircraft into a communal nest. She returned to the main cabin, turning her eyes briefly to the seat backs, then up to the empty overhead compartments.

“No peanuts,” Jay signed, coming to join her. “Birds got everything. What are you looking for?”

“I wanted to know where the plane came from,” she signed. “So I could work out how far it had flown.”

“Why?” he asked, as she led him back out of the plane and down to the tarmac.

“Because… no, it was a stupid idea,” she signed, and picked up one end of the awkwardly shaped orange and red oblong. Jay grabbed the other side of the uninflated raft, and together they carried it back towards the boat.

“Tell me,” he said, when they’d dropped it next to the stairs.

“Do you know what aviation fuel is?” she signed, as they went to collect the second of the two rafts. By the time they’d carried it over to join the first by the runway’s edge, he’d worked it out.

“You wanted to know how far it had flown so you’d know whether there was any fuel left?” he asked.

“Sort of,” she signed, and looked around for another plane. The birds landing on the broken propeller of the nearest was a good indication that there were no undead inside, but the six, small windows suggested that it wouldn’t carry anything larger than a life-vest. She pointed towards a large jet, a little further down the runway.

“Wait!” Jay exclaimed. “Do you mean that if you found a plane with fuel, we could fly it to Anglesey?”

“Not unless your Mum bought you flying lessons last year.”

“You mean you don’t know how to fly?” he asked, and looked genuinely disappointed at the revelation.

“I was Army, not RAF.”

“So why do you want to know if there was any fuel?”

“Because you can use aviation fuel in a diesel engine. You can’t just pour it in, we’d need a lubricant.” She saw his expression and decided to cut the explanation short. “We’d need to prepare it, but we could use it in a boat.”

“Why not just check the fuel tank?” he asked.

“And how do you do that?” she signed, and pointed at the nearest plane. “I don’t think it’s as easy as sticking in a piece of wire.”

“Oh. But wouldn’t it have evaporated by now?”

“Probably. That’s why I said it was a stupid idea,” she signed, then climbed up onto the wing. Her problem was that she saw the planes as what they had been: a near magical way for people to travel thousands of miles. In their new, harsh reality they were nothing more than scrap metal. She turned the handle, and opened the door.

A corpse fell out on top of her. She tripped, stumbling backwards onto the wing, trying to push it off. Except it wasn’t a corpse. Its arms clawed, catching in her clothes. Its mouth snapped down, and as she tried to shove it away, she lost her uncertain footing, rolled off the wing and down onto the tarmac. She kicked and punched at the thrashing creature until she was on top, pinning its arms, as Jay’s crowbar slammed down through its eye.

She pulled herself to her feet, pushed Jay back from the plane, and looked at the open door. There was nothing there. She climbed up, checked inside. It was empty.

“Like I said,” she signed, “it was a stupid idea. A dangerous distraction. All that we had is now lost, and we have to stop thinking we can have it again.”

Inside the plane they found the rafts, untouched, and a passport sticking out of a seat back pocket. Tuck flicked to the photograph. It might have belonged to the zombie, but it might not. She handed it to Jay.

“Egypt,” he read. “Is that where the plane came from?”

Tuck shrugged. There was no ticket with the passport. She checked the compartment above that seat, then the one next to it, then the ones opposite. They were all empty.

“I think,” she signed, “that he must have been a passenger on the plane. Everyone else left, but he stayed here. Perhaps because he thought it was safer. But that’s a guess. After all this time, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Mum would say that it does,” Jay said. “That’s why she writes down the names of the undead. Someone might be looking for him.”

“And if they are, and if they find us, then what should we tell them? That he made it to London, but no further than the airport, and seven months later we killed him on the runway? And that zombie might not be this man. He might have got out of the plane before it took off. All we could ever give anyone is more questions that could never be answered. There would be no comfort in that.”

“Maybe,” Jay said, unconvinced. They went back outside and took the rafts over to the boat.

“That’s four, how many more do we need?” Jay asked.

“As many as we can get,” Tuck signed.

“We could look for fuel instead,” he suggested.

She smiled, recognising his attempt to soothe her sombre mood.

“Where?” she signed. “I can’t see any storage tanks. They’ll be far away from the runway, probably on the other side of the terminal. If they were above ground, then like you said, the contents will have evaporated. But if they hadn’t, or if it was stored below ground and we found it, so what? We don’t have any way of transporting it.”

“Yeah, but that’s not really a problem,” Jay said. “Not compared to the other stuff we’ve done.”

“Maybe not, but collecting it would take time. We’d have to go back to the Tower, then back here, and back again. We’d lose three days, maybe a week, and at the end of it, what would we have? Like Chester said, we’ve enough fuel to get the boat down to Kent, and enough for a car to drive to Wales. What do we need more for?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

Jay looked as disappointed as she felt. There was something depressing about being surrounded by planes that would never fly again. Nor would people, she thought. Even with fuel and a pilot, they would never take off because there was nowhere left to land. She looked down at the rafts. They would help, of course, but the very point of them was that they didn’t require fuel. They represented another step away from civilisation. One day they would rip or tear, and then they’d have to try and make new boats out of wood. She wondered how far back they would have to go before they started moving forward, and how many generations it would take after that before people returned to the air.

“Let’s try that plane over there,” she signed. “Maybe we’ll find some peanuts.” The prospect appeared to cheer him up no more than it did her.

Terminal

Despite telling herself not to, Nilda couldn’t resist looking back at her son walking towards one of the planes, his hands moving in animated conversation with the soldier. She told herself to focus and turned her attention to the looming cluster of buildings ahead.

“A Geiger counter,” she said. “Would those be kept with customs or with the maintenance crews?”

“I’d say with the police and security people,” Chester said. “But we might be able to avoid going into the main terminal. The fire engines that they sent to major incidents all had radiological detection equipment on board, and if a plane crash isn’t a major incident, I don’t know what is.”

“A fire engine? How do you know that?”

He just threw her a sideways look.

“Seriously?” she asked. “You stole fire engines?”

“Only the one. And it wasn’t me who actually drove it off. I reckon they’d be kept in one of those warehouses. The doors are about the right height.”

They’d reached the point where the long ribbon of runway joined the far wider land on which the terminal and other buildings had been constructed. The nearest one had a pair of retractable gates. Both were closed, but next to the nearest was a door. Chester tried the handle.

“It’s locked,” he said. He pulled out a long hunting knife and was about to lever at the lock when Nilda put a warning hand on his arm and a cautioning finger to her lips.

“Listen,” she mouthed. It was soft, almost inaudible, but a dry, almost rhythmic rustling came from inside.

“Zombies?” Chester mouthed.

Nilda gave an uncertain shrug and moved over to the wide retractable gate. Cautiously, she leaned forward, pressing her ear against the cool metal. There was an explosion of sound. She jumped back, drawing her sword in one fluid movement, but the sound hadn’t come from inside the building. An irregular green streak poured out of a crashed jet. Out of all the possible explanations her brain started with the worst, cycling from smoke to chlorine gas before it reset, and she realised that she was looking at a flock of birds.

“Are they parrots?”

“N’ah, parakeets,” Chester muttered. “They were a common sight over the last few years.”

“Really?” she asked. “In London?”

“They were taking over from the pigeons,” he said. “I always reckoned they’d become the dominant—”

There was a clattering bang from inside the warehouse. In the shock of such an unexpected sight, they’d spoken at an incautious volume. There was no mistaking the rustling of cloth, nor the dry scrape of brittle nails down metal, one at a time, then growing in number and frequency until it was the only sound they could hear.

Nilda gripped her sword more tightly as she took a step back, then another. She was sure that the gate would fall, but it didn’t.

“Will it hold?” she asked.

“I was about to ask you that,” Chester replied, “but I think so.”

“Then we go on.”

She didn’t want to. She wanted to return to the boat and sail away from this forsaken island, but that was fear speaking. If they left now, they would have to look for the Geiger counter somewhere else. She remembered the faces of those she’d buried on the Isle of Scaragh and could too easily picture Jay suffering the same fate. No, they had to go on. There was no one to do the job for them, and nowhere to go if they failed.

“Do you know where customs is?” she asked.

“No.”

“You’ve not been here before?”

“Just to collect people. I’m more an airstrip kind of guy.”

“Planes coming in under the radar?” she guessed. “Did you even
own
a passport?”

“I did.” He paused. She could tell what was coming. “Lots,” he finished.

Most of what Nilda knew about City Airport had been learned in the last hour. What she knew about airports in general didn’t add up to much more. She’d only flown twice, once to Dublin, once to Frankfurt. Both were last minute city breaks, and both were with Jay’s father before their son was born. On those trips she’d had no interest in the airport, the flight, the sights, or anything else but him.