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

“And what happens next week or next month?”

“That,” she sighed, “is a good question. If you have any ideas let me know.”

“Huh,” he grunted. “So, what do we do now? Go home?”

“No. Not yet. It’s a beautiful day and I’ve had another idea. We’ll have to forget those stoves. When the power is cut, we’ll go old-school and cook over a fire. But I don’t want to leave any food lying around for that lot to steal. And I think I know somewhere they won’t have thought of. Not yet. Not until they’re really hungry.”

“Where, Mum?”

“You’ll see.”

They kept walking, heading almost, but not quite, towards their house.

“There.” Nilda pointed at a row of shops.

“The fish and chip shop?” Jay asked, peering at the signs.

“We can have a look in there, but I was thinking more of the veterinarian’s.”

“What for?”

“Oh, Jay,” she sighed. “There’ll be no more ambulances, no more doctors. If we get hurt, we’ve no one else to turn to. It’s just us to take care of each other.”

“So why don’t we go try one of the pharmacies if we want medicine?” he asked, confused.

“Because we need food, too. Come on.”

A window at the back had already been broken. Inside, they found that someone had come in and selectively emptied the pharmaceutical cabinet. Whoever had done it had known exactly what they were looking for. Nilda scanned through the remaining vials, packets, and jars. She didn’t recognise any of the names, so she left them be. The looters, however, had only been interested in the drugs. Inside a store cupboard, just behind the reception desk, was row upon row of pet food.

“Here.” She opened her pack and pulled out a dozen of the drawstring bags. “You fill each of these.”

“What with?”

“Pet food,” she said.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Start with… this.” She pulled a packet from the shelf. “Bird food. Nuts and seeds compressed into lard. It’s high calorie.”

“No way!”

“Calories are calories. And fat and nuts and seeds can be baked into a cake. Start filling up the bags. I’ll see what else we might need.”

She found sutures, needles and sterile bandages, scalpels and a dozen other assorted instruments, most of which she only recognised as the kind of props they had in late night horror films. There was an eye-wateringly large pair of forceps, the world’s largest syringe, and what looked like a miniature pizza cutter. She took the ones she could think of a use for.

“Do you want me to fill all these bags?” Jay asked. “I mean there’s a lot here.”

“This is food, Jay. We’re not leaving it,” she said. “Pack it all. We’ll make as many trips as it takes.”

“But still, it’s a lot to carry.”

“You keep packing, I’ll worry about that.”

She went out into the street. It didn’t take her long to find two pushchairs. She brought them back and showed him how to balance the bags on the handles, with more on the seat.

“It’s why I always had to make sure you were strapped in when I went shopping,” she said, “otherwise you were liable to jump out every time you saw a bird, then the pushchair would topple, and the shopping would end up scattered across the street.” He grunted an embarrassed indifference.

At Jay’s insistence they went inside the fish and chip shop. It was empty, but not looted. Everything from fat to potatoes to flour had gone. The freezers were unplugged and defrosted. Even the fridge by the cash register had been emptied of soft drinks.

“Satisfied?” she asked her son. He reluctantly agreed, and they headed home. Ten minutes later, they’d unloaded their bags. Before Jay had a chance to sit down, Nilda pushed him back out the door. They’d emptied the vet’s by lunchtime.

“Alright,” Jay said, collapsing into a kitchen chair. “That’s the vet’s emptied. We’ve enough food now, right?”

“Enough?” She picked up a can. “This says rabbit in gravy. With extra marrow-bone jelly. It sounds nice.”

“Huh!” Jay grunted.

“One of these,” Nilda went on, ignoring her son’s muted protest, “plus one of the tins of tomatoes, and some pasta, and we’ve got ourselves a meal.”

Jay took the can, suspiciously. “I dunno. Maybe. But is it going to be enough?”

“Work it out,” Nilda said. “One tin of rabbit, one tin of tomatoes. Forget the pasta for a moment and that’s two tins per meal. Since we want at least two meals each day, we need four cans per day, or one hundred and twenty per month. That’s fourteen hundred until we hit spring.”

Jay turned to look at the pile of cans on the living room floor. “I suppose we’ve got about… two hundred?”

“And counting what we’ve got in the cupboards, I’d say it was close to five hundred. We need at least three times that. At least. That’s just going to be the bare minimum for survival. And we want to do more than just survive. I think we should aim for three thousand.”

“You can’t be serious! Where are we going to put it all?”

“Sebastian’s house. Now come on, there’s a couple of hours left until dark. We’ll go to the garden centre down near the railway station. They sell pet food.”

9
th
March

“Come on. Get up.”

“It’s still dark.

“And it’s started to rain. But if you want to be eating more than bark and leaves in the winter, we need to go out and find more food. Today. Tomorrow and every day from now on.”

He groaned. She pulled the duvet off him. After he dressed, they went out. They came back, and they went out again. And again.

11
th
March

“It’s not a bad haul, Mum,” Jay said, loyally. It was mid-afternoon, their living room, kitchen, and hall were filled with cans and boxes. There were some packets of pasta, rice, and sugar and other more familiarly human food, but most of what they had found was intended for pets.

“It’s not enough,” she said.

“It’ll get us through until December, won’t it?”

“Ye-es,” she said slowly, as she turned the pages in the notebook. Every tin and packet they had found was listed, the inventory annotated with each item’s relative nutritional value, calorie content and any vitamins or minerals with which it had been fortified. “Probably into January. It’s what happens afterwards that worries me.” She sighed. “I just wish we’d gone to that pub yesterday.”

When she’d thought to go there earlier that afternoon, they’d found Rob and his gang ensconced outside. Nilda had heard them long before they were in sight. She and Jay had broken into a house and watched the group through a gap in a garden fence. Four of them, including Rob, sat at one of the tables outside the front door. They had a barrel lying on the table, dozens of broken glasses littering the ground at their feet, and a fug of smoke above their heads.

“Of all the pubs in town,” she said, bitterly, “why did they have to choose that one?”

It wasn’t the beer Nilda was after, nor what little might have been left in the kitchens. The pub had its own microbrewery. They specialised in a barley beer, and she knew for a fact that the barley was stored in a building at the back.

“We could try tomorrow. Or later tonight?” Jay suggested.

“No. They looked like they were settling in.”

“Well, what if we went back to Packard Street and see if we can get that fuel for the stoves.”

“They weren’t all at the pub. No, it’s too much of a risk. They’ll probably leave when the beer runs out. And I can’t see them touching the barley. We’ll go back in a week.” And hope Rob didn’t set fire to the place in the meantime.

It was frustrating. During their search for supplies, they had come across quite a few places that had been looted. Those Rob had been to were easy enough to spot, even if it hadn’t been for the ubiquitous black-papered roll-ups he’d left behind. Jay said it was Rob’s calling card. Nilda thought it was more like a dog marking its territory. Those places had been turned over and trashed; windows broken, furniture slashed, electronics taken or smashed. But there had been other houses, ones she was sure had been looted by someone else, someone who knew what to look for. There the food and some other supplies would be missing but only from one or two select properties on a street. Who that was, she didn’t know. Not that she wanted company, but she’d seen no women at the barricade nor at the pub. She knew with someone like Rob, it wouldn’t be long before he decided to come looking for her.

She had planned on going to the pub first thing that morning. Had she done so they would have been there when he and his lot arrived. That probably wouldn’t have ended well. Instead, on Jay’s insistence, they had taken a trip to the two nearest farms. He’d been the one to realise that without anyone to take care of them, any livestock left behind after the evacuation would be dead in a few days’ time. The animals had gone. So had the farmers, and they had managed to take every scrap of food with them. All that remained was one half of a formal requisition order.

“We’ll have some dinner, then we’ll have another think about where we’ll try tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe we could try one of the other pubs. There’s another microbrewery a few miles down the road, although I think they made their beer with hops. I’m not sure whether you can eat those. We’ll have to find a book on it. We could go to some more farms on the way.” Maybe. It had been over a week. She doubted any livestock left behind would still be alive, and she couldn’t imagine many farmers would have just abandoned their animals to die of neglect. Of course, what they would have done if they actually found some animals, she wasn’t sure.

She turned back to the stove. In a saucepan, a mixture of tinned tomatoes, herbs, and stinging nettles bubbled away. The nettles had been another of Jay’s ideas. He’d spotted them as they’d crept away from the pub. He’d seen some reality show about living off the land in which they’d been prominently featured. Perhaps, she thought, his summer spent doing nothing but watching TV wasn’t as big a waste of time as she’d thought.

His satisfied superiority in knowing something his mother didn’t faded when she’d stopped to pick them, announcing that they would be eating them for dinner.

“Now,” she asked. “Do you want rabbit or beef?”

“Look, I get that we’ll have to eat it sooner or later, but why can’t it be later?”

“Later we might be eating it cold from the tin.”

“You said, right, that when we’re hungry we’re not going to mind what we eat. So let’s wait until we’re hungry. Here. This one’s a ham.”

“I thought we’d keep that for your birthday. Let’s try the beef. Here, look at the ingredients. There’s nothing in it you wouldn’t eat normally, not if it came in a curry. In fact, you’ve probably eaten something just like it from that take-away down on—” She was interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Stay here,” she hissed, as she grabbed the cricket bat and headed to the front of the house. Jay, ignoring her, grabbed the other bat and followed close behind.

“Who’s there?” she called out.

“It’s me, Nilda. Sebastian.”

She glanced at her son, opened the door, and then took a step back in shock. Sebastian was almost unrecognisable. His hair was matted, his clothing was torn, and his face was coated in dirt except where it was covered in grey stubble.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“There was no vaccine,” he said. “It was all a lie. The Muster Points were just… It was a killing field. They murdered the evacuees.”

She made Sebastian strip off in the hall and sent Jay over to his house to collect some clothes. An hour later, they were sitting at the table, a pot of stew - containing no trace of dog food - between them. Jay’s and Nilda’s bowls were untouched. Sebastian was on his third before Nilda finally gave in to impatience.

“What do you mean murdered?” she asked.

“There was no vaccine,” he said, and as he spoke, his tempo rose, so the words came out in a barely coherent slur. “Of course there wasn’t. We should have known that from the start. We didn’t, did we? No, we wanted to trust the government. We needed to believe that someone was in control. That
they
would sort it out. Well
they
were in control.
They
did sort it out.
They
found a way of neutralising the entire population.”

“Slowly, Seb! Slowly. Tell us what happened. What did you see?” Seeing the usually composed man so disturbed was unsettling.

“I don’t know. I can tell you what I saw, but I can only guess at what it might mean.”

“Just start with when you left. It was half-five in the morning. The curfew was still in place.”

“Oh, they didn’t care about that. I passed a police car down by the station. Not that they were dressed like police. They wore the same Army uniform as everyone else. They just nodded to me and pointed out the way I should go. Not that I needed to worry about directions. They’d printed signs. Signs! Can you believe the cold-blooded ruthlessness of that? Not that the printers would have known, of course. Nor those who erected the fencing. Nor even the miss-uniformed police. They were probably as ignorant, as blind, as I was—”