Britain's End, Page 5

  “Can you give us a hand?” Aisha asked, dragging Nilda from her thoughts.

  “Of course,” she said. “With what?”

  “The pastry for the parakeet pie,” Aisha said. “We need to break up the ration bars, separate out the oats from the raisins and chocolate, then mill the oats into flour. It won’t be perfect, and it might be more of a crumble than a pie-crust, but it should work.”

  Yes, Nilda thought, there were too few of them, and in too precarious a location. There just wasn’t a simple answer as to where they should go next.

  Chapter 3 - The Citadel

  12th November, The River Thames, Day 244

  “Do you think everywhere is like this?” Corporal Denby asked, her eyes roaming from the rubbled ruin of Blackfriars Bridge to the fractured tower blocks either side of the river’s steep embankment. Nilda lowered the phone with which she was taking photographs of the remains of the bridge that nearly dammed the river, but it was Jay who spoke.

  “Tuck says no,” he said. “London’s different because of the civil war when some of Quigley’s people attacked each other. Chester saw it, didn’t he, Mum? He said there were missiles and helicopters and stuff.”

  “He did,” Nilda said cautiously. She knew what the Marine was really asking and while there was no comfort in telling her a lie, there was no purpose to a harsh truth. “Who knows what anywhere is like until you see it?” she said.

  “Like the cat in the box,” Jennings said.

  “Something like that,” Nilda said. “I’ve got all the pictures we need. We might as well continue down to Embankment.”

  She put the phone away, and picked up an oar. Jay, Jennings, and Denby did the same. George and Tuck rounded off their expedition, but there had been plenty of other volunteers. Lorraine, Dr Harabi, and the rest of Anglesey’s expedition to London had wanted to come. So had Kevin and almost all the adults in the Tower, not to mention Simone, Janine, and their gang of children. Compared to the waiting mountain of chores, the excursion to the stone fortress in Whitehall was close to a holiday. Aside from the danger, aside from that those chores had to be done, due to the lack of clearance around the collapsed bridge, there simply wasn’t room in the raft for more than half-a-dozen.

  The River Thames flowed clearer and faster than when Nilda had first arrived in London. The ash from the ruined buildings had been washed out to sea, or had settled to the riverbed. Floating wreckage was still a nuisance, but it wasn’t a danger. As stone and cement gave under the pressure of tide and river, the artificial dams created by the collapsed bridges had cleared except around Blackfriars Railway Bridge. The track had come free from the sleepers, and now jutted down into the water, preventing a concrete section of platform from falling to the river-floor. Water rushed through the rails, and around the concrete platform, and it was that which Nilda had been photographing.

  “What do you think?” Jay said as he hooked his oar around a rail, pulling the raft on. “Can we blow this up?”

  “Depends on the type of explosive, don’t it?” Jennings said, using his oar to push the life raft away from a jagged splinter of reinforced cement on the other side of the narrow opening.

  “Have you done it before?” Jay asked.

  “Done what?” Jennings asked.

  “Um… I don’t know what the military term is,” Jay said, “but when you blow up bridges and stuff.”

  “Demolition?” Jennings said.

  “Strategic degradation of enemy infrastructure?” Denby suggested.

  Tuck’s hands moved.

  “What did she say?” George asked.

  “She says it’s called a good day’s work,” Jay said.

  “A Marine, a soldier, and a submariner walked into a pub,” George muttered. “But branch one-upmanship aside, what are the chances of clearing that blockage?”

  “Like Jennings said, it depends on the type of explosive,” Denby said. “But there are two options. Either we sling it down there and pray, or we send someone down in a wetsuit.”

  Collectively, their eyes went to the dark waters of the Thames.

  “I wouldn’t want that job,” Jennings said. “But I know it’s muggins who’ll end up taking a swim.”

  “We’ll draw lots,” Nilda said. “But unless we can clear that section of rubble, we can’t get a hulled-ship up the Thames. And if we can’t do that, we’re stuck using the life rafts. They’re getting battered and worn, and wear can quickly turn into a tear.”

  In a bunker beneath the Admiralty Citadel on Horse Guards Parade, Quigley had set aside food, ammunition, some basic medical kit, and spare uniforms that Tuck had said were out of date three conflicts ago. With that, there was an assortment of other equipment that was surplus, close to expiry, or unsuited to modern warfare. From a count of the weapons, Quigley had prepared for around two thousand armed soldiers, but that didn’t give a true indication of how many people he had expected to keep alive in London. Debates had raged far too long into the night on the slave-like conditions he planned for the civilian workers, and the type of feudal kingdom the traitor might have created.

  After they’d found the bunker, shortly after McInery had died, they’d spent three days taking food and ammunition downriver to the Tower. By land, through the close-packed streets of London, it should have taken a little over an hour to travel the four miles. Delays caused by the undead had tripled the time, and added a risk that just wasn’t worth the reward.

  To stay in London, they’d have to clear the blockage around the ruined bridges, enabling a larger ship to reach Westminster. That meant they needed explosives, but there, at least, there was no shortage. Quigley had stockpiled a mixture of mines, plastic, mortar rounds, and grenades. Against the undead, they were akin to using a sledgehammer to swot a fly, and so they’d lain undisturbed.

  It was over dinner the previous evening that Nilda realised George and Lorraine were already planning their return to Anglesey. They would wait until the boats arrived, but then they would leave. Nilda was still unclear whether those boats’ crews would remain in London, but there was no way of knowing other than asking them, and that couldn’t be done until they arrived. In short, time had almost run out. Before George left, she needed a plan for the next six months. Ideally, she’d have a plan for at least the next year. Collecting the explosives was only part of the mission. The other part was to inspect the Royal Parks, and to make a decision about whether they could be turned into a farm.

  “Cleopatra’s Needle,” George said, peering up at the obelisk on the embankment. “So much history, so much that’s going to be lost.”

  “It was important, was it?” Denby asked as she swept her rifle across the corpses lying on the road.

  “I suppose not,” George said. “Not now. Though I do wonder if some archaeologist, a thousand years from now, will dig up this monument and think the ancient Egyptians first built this city.”

  There were close to a hundred corpses littering the road, so inhuman in their twisted mockery of a second life, it was impossible to tell whether they were decaying.

  “We meant to do something about them,” Nilda said apologetically. “We just haven’t had the time.”

  Tuck leaned against the embankment wall, clearly trying not to wince. “Time is right,” she signed, “and we’re wasting it here.”

  “Tuck will watch the raft,” Nilda said. “If we get separated, head for the river. The raft will remain here until four p.m. If you can’t make it back, go east. Follow the signs to Tower Bridge. Stay as close to the river as you can. If night comes and you haven’t reached home, barricade yourself somewhere and light a fire. We’ll look for the smoke. Our goal is Whitehall. The bunker is behind Horse Guards Parade. Beyond that are the parks, and Buckingham Palace. There will be zombies, there always are, but we’ve not lost anyone to them for weeks. Okay?”

  Denby shrugged. Jennings made a point of disengaging the safety on his rifle.

  It was eight days since Nilda had last come to
Whitehall. That had been a journey made with Greta as part of the continuing debate over whether they could make London habitable, and for how long. Nature was reclaiming the city, but she saw it more clearly here, on streets she knew but didn’t see everyday. Water pooled in gutters and puddled around depressions in the pavement. Reinforced steel, exposed by bullet or bomb, was oxidising orange as rust bit deep. The poster behind a cafe window was fading to white, while the glass was turning green. She checked the wire around the doors of the cafe, but it was still taut.

  “You sealed the door?” George asked.

  “After we searched it,” Nilda said. “That was about a month ago, when we were emptying the bunker of the supplies we’d need for the winter. The supplies we thought we’d need. We’ve already gone through a lot more than I’d expected.”

  “Zombie,” Jay said, but before he’d finished speaking, Denby fired. The scarecrow figure collapsed. Above, a bird took flight from an unseen roost in the roof of a Georgian grey-stone.

  “A magpie, I think,” Jennings said as his rifle tracked to the east. Denby scanned the south. Nilda listened. The dead city played a discordant concerto, out of time with the rhythm of life that had once thrummed through its streets, but it wasn’t the sound of the undead.

  “We’re clear,” she said.

  They followed Whitehall Place up to Whitehall itself. The road was lined with tanks, APCs, lorries, Land Rovers, and other bullet-riddled and bomb-damaged military vehicles. Nilda stepped over a corpse as Denby crossed to a tank.

  “Not sure how much use that’d be against the zombies,” the American Marine said.

  “Quigley wasn’t expecting the undead,” Jay said. “That’s what Chester said. The tanks, all of this, his army, it was so he could keep people in line. Unarmed people. Farmers. Civilians. People like us.”

  Denby tapped her rifle against the tank’s frame. “I wonder where he got the idea that a tank was a good tool for crowd control. He was your foreign secretary, wasn’t he?”

  “Not mine,” Jennings said. “I didn’t vote for him, or his party.”

  “Quigley was in covert operations before he was a politician,” George said. “In government, he was a sly, sanctimonious, self-righteous, self-important cynic who celebrated the inequalities of the past. In the end, he was simply mad.” George turned, and pointed south. “You see that, Corporal? That’s the Cenotaph, our memorial to the dead, and a reminder of the cost of war. A reminder that Quigley should have heeded each year he joined those laying wreaths. Instead, he followed the dictates of his personal demons, and there’s never any point trying to rationalise those.”

  “Agreed,” Nilda said. “Horse Guards is down there, we can cut through to the parade ground and the bunker.”

  “Where’s Number 10?” Denby asked.

  “You want a photo?” Jennings asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing it,” Denby said.

  “On our way back,” George said. “If we’ve got time.”

  The desire to visit Downing Street and play the tourist was so wonderfully normal that Nilda couldn’t help but smile.

  “Zombies,” the Marine said. “Two of them. I’ve got the one on the left.”

  “Mine’s on the right,” Jennings said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Marine and submariner fired almost as one. The two creatures collapsed barely before Nilda had turned her head to look at them. Their clothing was tattered, ragged, covered in mud, and they appeared to have come out of the ruins of the Ministry of Defence.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Nilda said, all good humour having evaporated.

  The entrance to the citadel’s bunker was through a nondescript door that led to a security checkpoint, another door, and a narrow flight of stairs. As with the shops near the river, they’d secured wire around the doors, and those wires were intact.

  “Sorry,” Jay said as they turned their torches on. “The lift’s broken. I asked them to send someone to repair it, but you know how it is.”

  “It’s down there, is it?” George asked, eyeing the stairs. “Then I think I shall plead age, and stay on guard up here.”

  “I’ll stay with George,” Nilda said. “Jay, show them the way. Have you got the phone?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I know what to do. Take photos of all the stores, and make sure that the size of the crates is obvious so we can work out how many we can fit onto a raft.”

  “And how long it will take to move them up here and then to river,” Nilda said. “And bring up some ammo as well.”

  Jay tapped his empty bag, and moved to the top of the stairs, but Jennings gently took his arm.

  “Me first. After all, this was a Royal Navy institution.”

  Jay shrugged, then followed the submariner down the steep steps, with Denby bringing up the rear.

  Nilda turned her face to the daylight, and followed George outside.

  “It’s an ugly building, isn’t it,” George said. “I’d often drive past and wonder what was inside this concrete carbuncle. I suppose, in the age of the internet, it was easy to find the answer, but the difficulty was knowing what question to ask.”

  “I often felt like that myself,” Nilda said.

  “It’s being confronted by youth, it makes one acknowledge the passage of time,” George said. “When you get to my age, it’s hard not to think about the past. It’s easy to get maudlin. Easier to get angry. That’s what my fellow residents in the retirement home were like, angry at the passage of time. That was their loss, because all that anger, all that hatred, it made no difference in the end. They died, Mary and I lived, and we’ve got a bit of a future ahead of us.”

  Nilda turned her eyes towards the buildings, then the road, and the vehicles parked along it. Her mind, though, had returned to Anglesey and that brief examination by the doctor during her almost-as-brief stay on the island. Considering the outcome, it had been too brief, but she didn’t need a second opinion. They had acquired plenty of medical textbooks, and most of those contained a few pages on acute radiation poisoning. There was no telling how much future lay ahead of her, nor whether she had more time left than George.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Best not to get maudlin, and no point getting angry.”

  “Best to stay busy,” George said. “On which note, what’s it like south of the river?”

  “There are more zombies than here in the north, at least immediately opposite us,” Nilda said. “Kent wasn’t too bad. Better than Cumbria and Yorkshire, really. Originally, there were hundreds of people in the mansion where we found the children. They left, in families or on their own, but always a few days apart. And they always went west. Our theory is that they led the zombies away from the county. Not sure what Kent is like now, though.”

  “Hmm. So what do you think, are you going to stay?”

  She hadn’t been expecting such a blunt question. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think… I think we need London. After the evacuation, after the rationing, there’s not much left anywhere in Britain, but I bet the same is true of Ireland, too. What London did have, thanks to the evacuation, is fewer people. There are other supplies here, batteries and cloth, clothes and tools, and… and maybe not medicine and bandages, but there are hospitals. There are ambulances and emergency equipment. Museums, too, with all their exhibits on life before electricity. We’ll find all of that elsewhere, but not in such great a concentration as here.” She gestured at the rooftops jutting up above the bare trees lining the Mall. “The buildings will collapse. The roads might flood. But for now, and as long as we have the river, we can get to those supplies quicker and easier than anywhere else in the world.”

  “The waterways are key, aren’t they,” George said. “Like they were a thousand years ago. We’ve oil for now, but when that’s used up, we’ll be back to sail. Of course, first we’ll have to learn how to make sailcloth. Let’s hope the zombies have died by then.”

  “Let’s hope.” She checked the time. “Fanc
y a stroll in St James’ Park? I wanted to see whether we could plant a crop there.”

  “Why not, and I can take a look and see if we can land a plane. Those trees tell me it’s unlikely.”

  “A plane?” she asked as they walked across the gravel.

  “We have one in Anglesey, but I don’t want to leave it there when we go. We can take it back to Belfast, of course, but if we could bring it here, well, like you say, the city is a mine of supplies. Boats aren’t the only way of moving that treasure.”

  “Link up London and Belfast by plane?” Nilda asked. “Why not? But we could clear City Airport. The runway’s covered in crashed planes, but we could drag them into the river.”

  “But how do we repair the runway?” George asked. “That’s why I’m interested in the parks. Grass grows back, and they must have spent millions manicuring the lawns Liz had for a view.”

  “Then I think you’re going to be disappointed,” Nilda said. “Come and see.”

  Shallow trenches had been gouged out of the park by the giant earth-moving machines. The depressions had filled with water from rain, and from the lake when it had overflowed its ornamental banks. Nilda jumped from one mound of discarded soil to the next as George, more slowly, followed. She stopped by a yellow digger.

  “It’s like this all the way to Buckingham Palace,” she said. “I’m no expert, but I can’t see how a plane could land here.”

  “No, no, I suppose not,” George said, easing himself up to sit on the caterpillar tracks. “What about the other parks?”

  “Hyde Park is similar. They moved less earth, but the Serpentine flooded. Green Park is better. The gardens behind the palace are better still, but I doubt they’re big enough to land a plane.”