Surviving the Evacuation 17: There We Stood by Frank Tayell

Author:Frank Tayell [Tayell, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Frank Tayell
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

He’d just decided the answer was nowhere when an amber-jacketed figure staggered out from the woods, a hundred metres ahead. Sholto braked, too hard and too fast. The truck skidded, turned, twisted ninety degrees. Glad he’d worn his seatbelt, he peered through the side window. The figure still approached. And… But no, it was just a zombie.

Sholto checked the mirrors, then each window, but the creature appeared to be alone, and now was only fifty metres away. Slowly he climbed out, picked up the rifle, and took aim. Yes, just one of the living dead, and when it reached twenty metres from the cab, he fired, and it was just dead.

But it was an unusual corpse. The kind he’d not seen in months. The jacket was clean. The boots were both laced. The jeans were muddy, but no more so than from a day’s hike.

He followed the path the zombie had walked, but lost the trail in a quagmire just north of the road where a lake had turned an acre of forest into a semi-submerged swamp. He returned to the zombie, and gave it a quick search. There was no wallet, no military tags. A belt beneath the coat had a sheath, but the knife was missing. There was no obvious wound, and it took him a minute cutting the clothing with his own knife to find the bite hidden beneath a homemade linen bandage. Who was he? How had he been infected? And had he killed the zombie before he’d turned?

When Sholto got back behind the wheel, his hand went to the bag, and the sat-phone therein, but all he had to tell the admiral were questions. No, he’d wait a few more hours in the hope he might be able to give her an answer or three.

He found more than that, half a kilometre down the road, when he reached the fort.

It was a new construction, built in an oval on woodland. Those trees had been chopped down, sawn up, sharpened, and rigged to form a palisade. There was a gate of sorts, beginning five feet above the ground, next to which hung a ladder, partially suspended in the air. The top was attached to a rope, which in turn was attached to a lever that presumably was tied to a counterweight on the other side of the head-height wall. Beneath the dangling ladder sprawled a zombie whose skull had recently been crushed. Not within the last week, but maybe within the last month, and certainly not much longer ago than that.

He grabbed the ladder and hauled it down. From the other side of the wall, a bell jangled.

“Hello!” he called, causing a bird to take flight from the cabin’s roof, but otherwise there was no reply.

He climbed up the ladder to the gate, a hatch three feet square. It swung outward easily enough, but he’d have to climb through head-first, presenting himself as a plum target. Something told him he wasn’t in any danger.

The property inside

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