Surviving the Evacuation, Book 18 by Frank Tayell

Author:Frank Tayell [Tayell, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Frank Tayell
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Behind the three-sided shelter, at the edge of the forest, was a grave. A small grave, but with a large wooden plaque on which had been neatly carved: Sadie Georgina Adelaide Roy, gone to rest among the trees she loved. She lives on in our hearts.

It was clearly a child’s grave. No age was recorded. To me, that suggested a child less than a year old.

Closer to the house, though facing the trees, was an archery target. A basketball hoop had been roped to a thick branch nearby. So close that this wasn’t the home of so many people that someone would be shooting arrows while someone else was shooting hoops. The ground beneath the hoop was uneven earth, not yet cleared from the winter’s storm. Unused since last year.

Against the house’s side wall, near where the archer might stand, a lean-to had been rigged. Mostly of wood, with a plastic-sheet roof, and with a crude wood-plank side-wall, leaving the other two sides open. Inside was a long garden bench covered in blankets and cushions, now damp. On the ground lay a paperback, discarded when the reader heard the sound of their gates being torn down.

No. That made no sense. If it were me, and if I’d heard vehicles tearing down my gates, the first thing I’d have done was tell Annette to grab Daisy and run. The second would have been to grab a weapon. But there were no signs of battle, just murder.

The barn was twice as big as the house, and the house was a large one with six bedrooms and four reception rooms, in addition to a sunroom and a brick-base conservatory filled with dehydrated seedlings. Where those extensions were clearly pre-outbreak, the barn’s was new. Guttering fed into a large plastic water tank. From there, pipes fed into a large feeder tank which, in turn, fed into the cisterns of three toilets. More water ran into a cold-water shower. Even without the cast, I wouldn’t have braved that for at least another two months. My curiosity about their septic tank system was forgotten when I went into the barn itself.

A speedboat rested on a trailer attached to the back of a metallic-blue four-by-four with Ohio plates. A relic of a refugee from the south, I assume. In the back of the speedboat were fishing nets, traps, rods, and other assorted nautical gear. Next to it was a horsebox. Instead of hay or dung, inside were a gasoline generator, a rotavator, and a compact excavator on mini tank-treads. The tools were the kind you’d use in a large garden. These survivors had scavenged what they could rather than seeking what they needed. They’d made do. They’d made it work. Up until they’d been killed.

Most interesting of all was the small tanker with a jury-rigged tow-bar so it could be hauled by the four-by-four. According to the warning labels, in the olden days, the tanker had stored diesel. Over those, someone, more recently, had painted the word gasoline.

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