“Unload your gear, then we’ll need to go out again to collect more supplies,” Nilda said, unloading the axes and crowbars they had taken from the fire station.
“We’ve taken over the cricket pavilion,” Jay said, in a far friendlier tone than his mother’s. “There’s plenty of room.”
“That small building?” Mr Harper asked, “We’ll probably take one of the rooms over in that block.” He pointed to the main school building.
“Suit yourself,” Nilda said. “The only working showers are in the pavilion.”
That seemed to persuade Sylvia Harper, and the children were too scared to care, but not Mr Andrew Harper.
“Well, where are
we
meant to sleep?” he asked. And Nilda was amazed that there was no residual thanks from their rescue of his family.
“One of the changing rooms?” Tracy suggested.
There were two changing rooms downstairs, each with its own set of showers. One for the home team, one for the visitors. These were on the ground floor, one on either side of a long corridor, bracketed by a plethora of storerooms. On the floor above were the offices, the box, a kitchen, and a long dining room with a working fireplace, which, according to the brochure they’d found, was rented out for fully-catered functions. According to the same brochure, each meal cost more than Nilda made in three months. Tracy and Mark had claimed that room. Sebastian had claimed the glassed in box overlooking the pitch, and Nilda and Jay had taken the largest office.
“No,” Mr Harper said flatly. “We’ll take one of the classrooms. Two of them I think.”
Nilda thought of protesting, but decided she couldn’t be bothered.
“Fine. Whatever.” She grabbed her empty bag and headed back to the bike.
“Where are you going?” Jay asked.
“Same place as you. We need to get the rest of the supplies.”
“I think,” Tracy said, eyeing the newcomers, “that I’ll stay here. I’ll see if I can get some of the taps plumbed into the water system. You reckon you can fall off a bike if I’m not there to watch?”
“I’ve been getting a lot of practice,” Mark said.
They went to Mark and Tracy’s house. It was a semi-detached, nicely located near one of the better infant schools. It was the ideal home for a family with children, or one expecting them. As they were packing up the supplies, Nilda noticed a photograph. It was of the two of them building a snowman on the green opposite the house. The couple looked happy, almost serene. Nilda remembered the last time they’d had a snowfall that thick. It had been four years ago. She glanced around. There were a few other pictures, but none more recent than that one. Nor were there any signs of children, but upstairs there was one empty bedroom, a slight pink tinge underneath the white-painted walls. Nilda thought she understood.
It only took the four of them one trip to load everything from the house. Nilda noticed that Mark left the photographs behind.
“I’d like to go and see what’s at the hospital,” she said when they were all outside the house.
“What for?” Jay asked.
“If there are undead there, it would be useful to know how many. And if there are only a few perhaps we can deal with them. If not… well, better we know now. You go on. I’ll meet you back at the school.”
“I’ll go too,” Jay said.
“We’ll all go,” Sebastian offered.
Nilda tried to protest. It did no good.
They saw no undead on the way to the small hospital.
“I doubt we’ll find anything,” Mark panted. “I saw them bring up vans and lorries to empty the place. That was back during the curfew.”
“I can’t believe they’d be efficient enough to take everything,” Nilda replied.
But all plans for investigating the hospital were quickly abandoned when they saw the front entrance. There was a car, its doors left wide open, which had crashed into the main entrance. Around it, moving purposelessly this way and that, were two dozen of the undead.
“Let’s get back. There’s no point hanging around,” Mark said.
“Wait,” Nilda replied.
“What for?”
“I want to see if they’re coming from inside or not.”
“Impossible to tell,” Sebastian said. “The doors are broken. They can roam freely inside and out. We’ve got to assume that the building’s infested with them.”
“Come on, Mum,” Jay said.
Reluctantly Nilda followed them back to the school. It wasn’t that she expected to find anything useful in the hospital, not really. But with each passing day there were more and more of the undead. She was starting to think they would need to prepare for a siege. And she was worried that was something none of them would survive.
“No!” They heard Tracy say to Mr Harper when they arrived at the school.
“I don’t see why not. It can’t be hard,” he replied.
She was covered in dirt except for the parts soaked with water, and even those were coated in a thin layer of grease. She was sitting on the steps to the pavilion, Mr Harper standing just a few inches too close, towering over her.
“No. You’re right. It’s not hard. It’s impossible.”
“What is?” Mark asked.
Harper turned, surprise on his face. Despite the noise of wheels and bags and feet, he’d not heard them approach. Nilda thought she now partly understood how he’d become trapped.
“I was just asking why she can’t get the showers over in the boarding house to work.”
“Because,” Tracy said as she slowly stood up, “that building is over there, on the other side of the school. The pipes aren’t connected. So I’d either have to lay new ones, or dig up the concrete to find the old ones. I don’t have any pipes. I don’t have any way of digging through concrete. You want showers? You use these ones. You want hot water? You boil it yourself. You want to eat then you help find the food.”
Mumbling something about ‘getting the kids settled in,’ he headed back to the boarding house.
“I don’t like him,” Tracy said, as they unloaded the bikes. “Since you left I haven’t seen the kids or that woman. It’s just him and there’s something about him that I just don’t like.”
“He’s here now,” Mark said. “There’s not much we can do about that.”
Wishing she disagreed, Nilda finished unloading. She wanted to put her feet up. She was tired. Jay and the others were too, but there wasn’t time for rest. They went out again, this time going back to the terrace to collect the food.
The problem was Mark. Had the roads not been covered in so much litter from the evacuation, he might have fallen off his bike less often. As it was, he stumbled to a halt every few hundred yards. He didn’t always fall off, though he had a tendency to throw his feet out and let go of the handlebars, allowing the bike to drop to the ground with a clatter that echoed off the deserted buildings. At first it had been funny, then it had been frustrating, and then, when they reached the end of one particular road and saw four of the undead coming towards them, they realised how dangerous it was. They’d not fought, but turned, and found a different way around.
Jay, Sebastian, and Nilda made a second trip on their own. By the time they got back their exhaustion, caused as much by tension as exertion, was complete. They collapsed on the steps outside the pavilion next to Tracy and Mark. The Harpers appeared a few minutes later.
“What about sorting out some food then,” Mr Harper half-asked, half-demanded.
“I don’t cook,” Nilda said, firmly. Tracy said nothing.
“Oh? Right.” There was that tone in his voice again.
“I do,” Mark said. “And not as badly as Tracy makes out.”
Despite what Tracy said, Mark was a good cook. Or good enough when the ingredients all came in tins.
After they’d eaten a meal in stilted silence, Nilda went outside to stare at the pitches. Sebastian followed her.
“Not quite the people one would wish to be stranded with at the end of the world,” Sebastian said. “The timid wife, and the husband about to graduate from petty chauvinism to full blown misogyny.”
“No. That I can deal with. There’s something else about Andrew Harper I just don’t trust.”
“You think he’s violent?” Seb asked.
“Towards Sylvia and the kids, you mean? No. He’s not, I’m sure of it.” And she was sure. She knew ‘violent.’ But that was a long time ago, before Jay was born. “He’s just not… I don’t know. My gut says kick him out. But perhaps I’m being unfair. I was never that good at judging people.”
“I had noticed that,” he said.
She turned to glare at him, but saw he was smiling.
“I knew someone, once,” Nilda said. “It was a long time ago. He would always watch groups and how they interacted. He’d look at the dynamic and explain why people acted the way they did. Like, he’d say that some of them were reverting to childhood or trying to exert dominance or something.”
“He was a psychologist?” Sebastian asked.
“Nothing like that. He was just fascinated by people. We used to go up to Westminster on Saturdays, and we’d sit on the bench outside the Cathedral and watch all the tourists. I’d make up stories about the people, but he had a way of knowing what they were thinking. Like, if they were waiting for someone, and if it was a date or family. And he’d always get it right. Always. I mean, at first I thought he was guessing, but he actually went up to people to ask. And, once, there was this…” She shook her head, as if to banish a too raw memory. “Anyway, we don’t have time for that. Not now. I don’t care why they’re acting the way they do. Either they pull their weight and help, or they go.”
“Except they won’t. I know you won’t kick them out. Not the children.”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “Fine. That means we’ve got new mouths to feed and backs to protect, and out of the four of them only one is a provider, and at best he’s going to only provide for them. Maybe we can change that. Maybe we can get the woman working. Maybe. But right now, they’re a liability. We need more people. Or, one way or another, a lot fewer.”
“But if they won’t go… Wait, you’re thinking of leaving?”
“Just you, me, and Jay. Perhaps. If I knew of somewhere safer than this, then I’d say we should leave right now. I’d even leave the food. Or some of it. But where can we go? We went through all that and ended up here.”
“So we stay. And you’re right. If that’s going to work then we need more people. And it has to work. There’s nowhere to run to. So how do we find others?”
14
th
March
They lit a bonfire. Wanting to separate the Harpers, Tracy and Mark took Sylvia to begin digging up the cricket pitch. The two children helped Jay keep the bonfire lit and fed with evergreen branches to send up a pillar of smoke. Sebastian and Nilda took Mr Harper back to the terrace to gather the last of the food.
“This is your place is it?” Mr Harper said sniffily when he saw the small house. Nilda said nothing as they collected the last of the bags.
When they got back they found a middle-aged woman, Nilda vaguely recognised, tearing away at the grass with a vengeful ferocity. She paused, leaning on her shovel just long enough to introduce herself as Marjory Stowe, someone who’d worked at the fish counter at the supermarket, before ripping into the ground once more. Nilda didn’t ask what demons she was exorcising.
Nilda headed over to the pavilion to unload the bags.
“Is that the lot?” Jay asked.
“More or less. How are things here?”
“This new woman. She’s alright. The kids are… I dunno. Scared, I suppose.”
“We all are.” She looked around. She saw the activity, she heard the noise. “There’s a few more things I want to get from the house. Will you be all right here?”
“You want me to come with you?” he asked, giving her a far too grown-up look.
“No. I’ll go on my own. It’ll be easier. If I see any of the undead, I’ll just turn around and come back.”
She headed straight to their house. She came across the undead only once. Two of them were shambling down the street towards the town. She doubled back and took a different road. When she arrived at the terrace, she checked that the street was empty and the alley clear. Only when she was sure she wouldn’t be heard did she kick down the front door. Satisfied at the way the lock had splintered, she went inside and opened all the cupboards in the kitchen, pulling out the saucepans and crockery onto the floor. She stamped on a few mugs, kicking the shards out into the living room. She opened and emptied the drawers, then went upstairs and did the same up in the bedroom. Taking one last look around her house she decided that, yes, if anyone came they would see a place that had already been looted.
She left the house, and then searched for some more bicycles. She found two easily enough, but if - or more likely when - she left, she hoped Sebastian would be coming too. She found a third, then hid all three under a tarpaulin in a neighbour’s backyard.
“Good enough,” she murmured. She had her escape plan. But bikes were slow.
She glanced towards the edge of town. The smoke from their bonfire was clearly visible above the rooftops. She thought about going straight back, but there was one last place she wanted to check. The police station. And she wanted to do it without anyone else knowing. Sebastian had mentioned seeing a few police cars during his journey to the Muster Point, but he’d mostly seen Army vehicles. It had been the same in the days before the evacuation. There was a chance then, that the police vehicles would still be parked at the station and have fuel in their tanks. Not a great chance, but one worth investigating. With so many undead nearby, if she could think of somewhere they might go then she would prefer to drive.