Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home (10 page)

“Two hundred metres,” Styles said. “Perhaps less.”

Nilda nodded. “Over the ambulances, then. Give me a boost.”

Styles cupped his hands, and Nilda pulled herself onto the vehicle’s roof. Then she saw them. There were hundreds. More. The road beyond was crowded with the living dead. Almost as one, hundreds of arms were slowly raised as decaying hands reached towards her. Mouths opened, and the canyoned street filled with a sibilant hiss of air being sucked into dead lungs.

“Back!” Nilda yelled as she jumped down from the ambulance. “To the raft. There’s too many.”

“How many?” Yvonne asked.

“Hundreds. Literally. Just go. Quick.”

There was a metallic screech from behind her as the great heaving mass of death pushed at the ambulances.

“
A
hundred or hundreds?” Yvonne asked, as Styles pulled the rope from the ladder’s rung.

“They were five or six wide, and thirty, forty, fifty deep. I don’t know,” Nilda said. “From the way they were crammed in there, the roads behind them are blocked and they can’t get out, but whether they’re blocked by the undead, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. We can’t get to the Shard from here.”

“But we’re so close,” Yvonne said.

“What about climbing up the wrecked bridge?” Greta asked. “Could we get to the building from the train station?”

Nilda looked at the white-water surging around the fallen masonry. “We could probably get up there, but what if the station is just like the road?”

“Let’s go back and get the drone,” Styles said.

“We can’t give up,” Yvonne said. “Not yet. And since we have to go back downriver, can’t we try somewhere else, closer to the Tower?”

“It can’t hurt,” Nilda said, and once again, they picked up the oars.

Nilda’s gloves were ruined as she pulled herself up another moss slick ladder, this one fifty metres from the floating hulk of HMS Belfast. Her shoulders twitched from the strain of rowing against the current, but the moment she reached the top, her hand moved automatically to draw her sword. The narrow section of river walkway was empty of the undead. She listened but could hear nothing except damp feet stepping on moss-coated rungs as the others climbed up from the raft.

Judging by the desk chair and table ostentatiously placed behind a nearly transparent floor to ceiling window, the building looming above her was an office block. It overhung the path, but the brick columns, spaced four metres apart, looked decorative rather than as if they were actually supporting the building above. Coupled with the jinking route the path took as it followed the line of the river, Nilda could only see fifty metres to the east and west.

“The Tower looks different from over here,” Styles whispered, pointing across the river.

“The whole of London does,” Nilda said, her voice equally low. She gestured to the west. “This way?” It was more a suggestion than an order, but the others nodded. They looked like she felt. Not scared, but nervously expectant, knowing that a fight with the undead was inevitable, and the risk of death was unavoidable.

They passed one grime-smeared window after the next, each office beyond filled with an identical desk, chair, and art deco wall clock. She counted five before the windows were replaced by brick, and then, on the ground floor at least, the offices gave way to a restaurant. It was unlike any Nilda had seen since February. The doors and windows were unbroken.

“There’s got to be something inside,” Styles whispered as he peered through the door. “I can see tables and chairs, all neatly stacked. I think… yes, there’s bottles still behind the bar.”

“It doesn’t feel right,” Yvonne said. “I mean how has it survived so long untouched?”

Nilda tried the door. It was locked. “They must have closed up and just not come back.”

“That’s theoretically possible,” Yvonne said. “But is it likely? Let’s just go on. We came here for the Shard, not for supplies.”

Nilda shook her head. “We can’t. Look, we’re all thinking the same thing, right? That there’s twenty or thirty or who knows how many zombies inside there. Well what if there is, and they hear us and come flooding out onto this path just when we’ve gone past? We wouldn’t get back to the raft, and with the state the river’s been in the last few days, I don’t think we’d survive swimming in it. We have to check inside.”

“Then let’s get it done,” Styles said, stepping forward and ramming his crowbar between door and lock. The splintering crack of breaking wood echoed along the path.

Nilda reached out a hand to stop him as he moved to open the door. “Listen,” she whispered. There was nothing, but the silence just added to the feeling of imminent danger.

Styles angled to the bar as Nilda headed to the kitchen. On a counter underneath a row of tarnished saucepans was a half-filled plastic crate. The shelves and cupboards were nearly empty. The packaging of the packets inside the crate, and in the few boxes left in the cupboards, had been gnawed to shreds. What the rodents hadn’t eaten had mixed with months of damp to create a greenish sludge.

She moved through to the back of the kitchen, and tentatively, with one hand braced ready to pull it shut, tried the handle. It moved, but the door didn’t open. Leaning an ear against the cool metal, she listened. There, muffled but distinct, she heard that familiar whispering rustle of rotten cloth and shuffling feet. Her eyes fell on the walk-in freezer. Sword drawn, she pulled the door open, and then slammed it shut almost immediately. The stench made her gag. It had been full, but of food. The contents now lay in a putrescent mass on the floor.

“There’s some fruit juice and bottled water behind the bar,” Styles said. “Champagne too, if you fancy it. Beer’s off, though.”

“There’s nothing in the kitchen,” Nilda said. “Not food, anyway. There’s probably salt and vinegar in one of the cupboards, but not much else. The owners must have come back on the night of the outbreak, taken what they could and planned to come back for the rest. But they didn’t. Or maybe they couldn’t. I can hear the undead in the road outside.”

“Fruit juice and water is a nice find,” Greta said “but it’s not what we came for.”

They blocked the door with a pair of tables, and continued down the path.

The restaurant was the last building in the block. Between it and the next was a gap too narrow to be called an alley. A gate ran across its mouth with railings extending for a further three metres above it. At the far end of the alley was a second gate, and beyond that Nilda could see the undead, one squatting right in front of it, two more slouching along the road behind.

She darted to the far side of the gate and the relative safety of cover offered by the next building. That turned out to be a wine bar, followed by an office with a similarly narrow alley with a gated entrance, and more undead in the road at the far end. At the end of the next anonymous office block was a far wider alley. It, too, was gated, but they had a clearer view of the road beyond and the undead, standing motionless on it.

Nilda said nothing. She didn’t have to; they’d all seen it. She motioned back the way they’d come. No one said anything until they’d retreated to the door of the restaurant.

“I counted twenty,” Nilda said.

“I made it about the same,” Greta said.

“So what do we do?” Yvonne asked.

“If we’re going to fight our way to the Shard, then it would be better to do it nearer to London Bridge,” Styles said.

“What we need is height,” Yvonne said. “If we could get to the top of one of these buildings, we could fly the drone around and get a proper view of the roads. That would be safer, wouldn’t it? And maybe we could use the drone to lure the zombies away.”

“A tall building? This restaurant didn’t have a door into the offices above,” Nilda said. “I doubt that wine bar would either. We can try further east.”

Three hundred yards to the east, the river path widened, and Yvonne called out.

“This one,” she hissed, pointing at a window.

Nilda glanced up. The building was barely six-storeys high, but it was what was behind the glass window that had caught Yvonne’s attention.

“It looks a bit like a break room,” she said. “Or maybe a cafe.”

A little further on, the path widened again. Next to the river was a viewing platform complete with a trio of benches and a metal map annotating the skyline south of the river. In the middle of the path itself was a silent fountain, and behind that was a set of glass doors and the entrance to the building.

The glass was as caked in grime as the others they’d passed, but from what Nilda could see of the interior, it looked as if two stubby tower blocks had been built, complete with windows that looked down on an empty atrium. They’d been positioned in a V-shape that met around an elevator shaft and what she guessed was a reception desk. A glass wall which stretched from the ground to the roof, had been built to encompass the two blocks, the atrium, and elevator.

“There are no signs on the doors,” Styles said. “No clue as to what they did inside. And those windows all look like the blinds have been drawn. It’s a bit odd for an office. You want to go inside?”

Nilda gave the doors a hopeful push. They moved just enough to confirm they were bolted at the top and bottom. “Try it,” she said.

Styles pushed the chiselled end of the crowbar between the door and the pavement. He gave it an experimental push. The door barely wobbled. He stood, raised his foot, and stamped down on the curved end of the crowbar. The lock didn’t break, the glass did. There was a brief sharp crack, and before Nilda could tell him to stop, a great fissure leaped up, reaching halfway before the entire glass pane shattered. Nilda jumped backwards but not quickly enough. She felt a white sliver of pain as a ragged shard sliced through her cheek. As the tinkling vibrato died away, the path became silent once more. So silent she thought she could hear the warning chirps from the parakeets on the other side of the river. Then she was hit by the smell, so dense it was like a wall, billowing out from inside. It was that musty, dark odour of decay they’d become so familiar with.

“What kind of reinforced glass shatters like that?” Styles muttered.

“The kind that isn’t reinforced,” Yvonne said. “Which means the doors aren’t usually locked.”

“Then let me rephrase the question, what kind of building doesn’t usually lock their doors.”

“Let’s go inside and find out,” Nilda said.

Broken shards crunching beneath their feet, they walked over to the reception desk. Next to a row of blank screens and silent phones was an old-fashioned in-tray. Nilda picked up a letter from the top, her interest not in the contents but in the address at the top.

“The Tower Bridge Hospital,” she read aloud, and then glanced at the covered windows looking down at them. “Those must be the patient’s rooms.”

“I thought the hospital was near London Bridge,” Greta said.

“That’s Guys, the NHS one. This place must be private,” Nilda said.

“The hospitals were emptied, weren’t they?” Yvonne asked.

“I think so,” Nilda said. But then she wondered why she thought that. She’d not got closer than the car park of the one in Penrith, and she couldn’t remember Chester telling her what had happened elsewhere. Her nostrils flared and again were filled with that forbidding scent. “But I don’t think this one was.”

“I can’t find a map,” Greta said. “They must have been digital. That coffee shop is probably… that way. Those doors there, I think.”

They followed the signs to the Tower View Restaurant. Nilda’s hand gripped and regripped her sword, as she expected to see the undead with each turn and every new corridor, but they saw none before they reached the restaurant. One of the shutters had been rolled up leaving a gap two feet wide. Nilda ducked under it.

“Restaurant?” Styles scoffed. “It’s more like a coffee shop with delusions of grandeur.”

“The prices aren’t bad,” Yvonne said, reading the board behind the counter. “At least for London.”

“The kitchen’s empty,” Nilda said, looking quickly inside. “It’s small. There’s no storage space.”

“Must be down in the basement,” Styles said, checking the cupboards under the counter. “There’s some disposable cups and cutlery. Some napkins. Nothing else.”

“Do we look for the food, or do we go to the roof?” Greta asked.

“Neither,” Styles said. “I vote we go back outside and look for a different building. There’s something wrong about this place. The closed door, the lack of food. That smell, that’s death.”

“No,” Nilda said. “I know it’s tempting. All instinct tells us to flee. But where to? Back to the Tower? And then what? If we can get this telegraph to work, then in a week’s time either Eamonn will have reached Anglesey or they’ll have heard the message. If not…” She stopped. “It has to work. There’s no other choice. We’re here. We have to try. There’s no one else who’ll do it for us.”

They found a stairwell twenty yards down the corridor to the right. Nilda pushed the door, holding it open with her foot, as she held the sword ready to stab at a creature stumbling out through the dark. She turned the flashlight on. Dust danced in the feeble beam, but nothing larger appeared. She tapped the sword against the metal hand rail. The metal gonged, but there was no answering shuffling clatter of a zombie rising from a crouch to stumble down the stairs.