Surviving the Evacuation, Book 16 Read online

  Surviving the Evacuation

  Book 16

  Unwanted Visitors

  Unwelcome Guests

  Frank Tayell

  Reading Order & Copyright

  Surviving the Evacuation 16: Unwanted Visitors, Unwelcome Guests

  “The best time to have learned anything is yesterday, but now is better than never.”

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2019

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and (most) events are fictional.

  Post-Apocalyptic Detective Novels

  Strike a Match 1. Serious Crimes

  Strike a Match 2. Counterfeit Conspiracy

  Strike a Match 3. Endangered Nation

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  Surviving The Evacuation/Here We Stand

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Zombies vs The Living Dead

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

  Here We Stand 1: Infected

  Here We Stand 2: Divided

  Book 8: Anglesey

  Book 9: Ireland

  Book 10: The Last Candidate

  Book 11: Search and Rescue

  Book 12: Britain’s End

  Book 13: Future’s Beginning

  Book 14: Mort Vivant

  Book 15: Where There’s Hope

  Outback Outbreak

  Book 16: Unwanted Visitors, Unwelcome Guests

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  http://www.FrankTayell.com

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  Synopsis

  Once it was home to half a billion people. A year after the nuclear war, Europe is a radioactive, storm-ravaged wasteland through which a hundred million undead inexorably march. In their wake, they leave nothing but ruins. Ahead of them flee those few who managed to survive this long. Chasing them are the dregs of humanity. Once known as the Rosewood Cartel, they kill, loot, and destroy as indiscriminately as the living dead.

  Hope might be lost, but it could still be found, as can a future for the last remnant of humanity. Those who built a sanctuary on Anglesey, in Dundalk, in Creil are the help that came to others. In this, their darkest hour, but with a new dawn so close, they will not give up.

  Set in the Faroe Islands, France, Denmark, and elsewhere, the battle has begun, but the war hasn’t yet been lost.

  Table of Contents

  The Story So Far

  Part 1: Daughters & Sons

  Day 257, 25th November

  Chapter 1 - Subterranean Homesickness

  Day 258, 26th November

  Chapter 2 - Lost En Route

  Chapter 3 - Dance of the Dead

  Chapter 4 - Handover of Power

  Day 259, 27th November

  Chapter 5 - The Life of a Stream

  Day 260, 28th November

  Chapter 6 - Tunnels and Bridges

  Part 2: Power and Diplomacy

  Day 261, 29th November

  Chapter 7 - Missed Rendezvous

  Day 262, 30th November

  Chapter 8 - Refuge of the Gods

  Chapter 9 - Check-In

  Chapter 10 - Reference & Research

  Day 263, 1st December

  Chapter 11 - The Dead Farm

  Chapter 12 - Bridges and Barbs

  Chapter 13 - Warfare, Ancient and Modern

  Chapter 14 - Memories of Malin Head

  Day 264, 2nd December

  Chapter 15 - The Light of a New Dawn

  Part 3: Unexpected Guests

  Day 261, 29th November

  Chapter 16 - A Question Interrupted

  Chapter 17 - Vertical Tunnels

  Chapter 18 - A Final Answer

  Day 262, 30th November

  Chapter 19 - Testing Times

  Chapter 20 - Foreign Duty

  Day 263, 1st December

  Chapter 21 - Paintings of Ghosts

  Chapter 22 - Spotters Above

  Chapter 23 - Bellow Death, Below

  Chapter 24 - Planning for War

  Chapter 25 - Lights Out

  Day 264, 2nd December

  Chapter 26 - Birdstrike

  Day 265, 3rd December

  Chapter 27 - Ida Hansen

  Day 266, 4th December

  Chapter 28 - An Early Honeymoon

  Chapter 29 - In the Red

  Chapter 30 - Unwanted Visitors

  Chapter 31 - Nicki

  Chapter 32 - Lisa Kempton and the Sisters

  Chapter 33 - Unwelcome Guests

  Chapter 34 - Bringing an RPG to a Knife Fight

  Chapter 35 - Defeat in Victory, Triumph in Defeat

  Day 270, 8th December

  Epilogue 1 - Settling In

  Day 275, 13th December

  Epilogue 2 - Bringing Them All Back Home

  The Story So Far - Day 261, 29th November

  The New World, The North Sea, Between Nieuwpoort & Calais

  The luxury cruise ship, The New World, didn’t so much plough through the waves as trim their caps as she skimmed southward. One hour into the seventy-kilometre voyage from the Belgian yachting town of Nieuwpoort to the French port of Calais, and the journey was already half done. Among the passengers, most of the adults had left Anglesey on a grain-carrying freighter which had run aground in Dundalk. Most of the children had escaped London as the approaching horde brought that city’s final doom. But they didn’t represent all those who’d escaped London and Dundalk. Some now crewed the cruise ship the Ocean Queen, already shouldering its way towards Ireland. Others were aboard the Royal Navy amphibious assault ship HMS Courageous, which sat, nearly fuel-less, off the Belgian coast. But not Jay or Annette.

  “There you are,” Annette said, opening the door to the windowless storage room near the ship’s stern. The cat she’d been struggling to keep in her arms squirmed free and sprang up onto the top-most of a stack of transparent plastic boxes.

  “Shh,” Jay said. “And close the door.”

  “Why? There’s hardly any light in here,” Annette said.

  “Just do it,” Jay said. “Please.”

  “Fine. Fine,” Annette said. She stepped inside and pulled the door closed. Only then did she think to ask, “Did you want to be alone?”

  “I’m hiding,” Jay said. “From the kids. Hide and seek.”

  “Oh,” Annette said, trying to keep the amusement from her face. She sat on one of the near-empty storage boxes. According to the crossed-through contents scrawled on the side in heavy felt-pen, it had contained paper plates when they’d left Dundalk, but now contained disposable cups. “I used to play that with Daisy, but she’s outgrown it. Anyway, I came here so you could be properly introduced.”

  “I met you yesterday,” Jay said. “Don’t you remember? When this ship got to Belgium?”

  “I didn’t mean introduced to me,” Annette said. “I meant to Commodore Tabitha Nelson.”

  “Who’s that?” Jay asked.

  “The cat,” Annette said. “Tabitha because she’s a cat. Nelson because she’s a ship’s cat. Commodore because she acts like she outranks us all. We rescued her from Dundalk.”

  “Ah. Oh. Okay,” Jay said, increasingly uncertain. “And you want me to say hello to her?”

  “That’s up to you. She’s a member of the crew, so it’d be polite, but she’s still just a cat, so I wouldn’t expect a reply.”

  “Right,” Jay said, uncertainty flipping into full-bore confusion.


  “But I was looking for you for another reason,” Annette said. “George Tull said I should.”

  “He’s looking for me?” Jay asked.

  “No. But he said I should come talk to you. Actually, it was Mary O’Leary more than George,” Annette said. “And George said I shouldn’t bother Chester and your mum because you’d be more help than them anyway.”

  “I would? What with?” Jay asked. “Wait. Shh.” He clambered over the piles of half-empty crates to the door, leaned his ear against it, and listened as small feet pattered along the corridor outside. “We’re clear,” he said.

  “Do you… do you enjoy playing games like this?” Annette asked, taking a book and pen out of her shoulder bag.

  “What’s that pen for?”

  “Oh, I’m writing a history,” Annette said. “While Bill’s… you know, recovering. He started a journal the day after the nuclear war began when he was trapped in London. He kept it up as he travelled through England, after he found Kim, and then me and Daisy, and Sholto. And then he kept writing while he was on Anglesey. But, you won’t believe this, he didn’t write anything down while he was in France. Not a single word! I did, though, about me and Kim and Mary and everyone getting shipwrecked off Dundalk. Now I’ve got to fill in the gaps. Like about what happened to you in London, and about what happened to Bill and Chester in France. George said that Chester told you all about it.”

  “Yeah, but maybe you should ask him,” Jay said. The cat nimbly leaped onto a crate at eye-level with Jay, where she gave him a calculatingly judgemental stare.

  “I’ll have to check the details with Chester, of course,” Annette said primly. “Kim says it’s important to get multiple sources for each account. To make sure they’re true.”

  “So you want to know what happened to me?” Jay asked, giving in to the inevitable. He sat down on a crate of his own. The cat, now perched above them both, watched him with interest. “Well, first, Mum and me didn’t go on the evacuation—”

  “Oh, no,” Annette interrupted. “I know all that. You and your mum lived in Penrith. You got separated. You went to London while she went to Scotland. You know I met her? Rescued her, in fact. During the summer, from that island up near Scotland that she was stranded on.”

  “That was you?” Jay asked.

  “Yeah. Kim was there, too,” Annette said. “We were on our way back from Svalbard to Anglesey. That’s where we found the fuel for these ships. But, yeah, I met your mum. That was before we got to Anglesey and she met Chester, they went off to Penrith and found that letter you left for her. That’s right, isn’t it? That you left a letter in your old home saying you’d gone to London?”

  “That’s right,” Jay said.

  “So if your mum had gone home, rather than traipsing across the Scottish lowlands, she’d have ended up in London a lot sooner?” Annette said, as much accusation as question in her tone.

  “I guess,” Jay said. “But she wouldn’t have met Chester, or known about Anglesey. How do you know this stuff, anyway?”

  “I was talking with Aisha,” Annette said. “I wanted to know when her baby is due. She thinks February. That will be exciting, won’t it? But I got a lot of it from Chester when he was staying with us on Anglesey. You know, after he and Sorcha Locke escaped from Birmingham, after Scott Higson rescued them in that helicopter.”

  “Oh, yeah, Chester stayed with you on Anglesey, didn’t he?”

  “With me and Kim and Bill, yeah,” Annette said. “He’s surprisingly tidy. Compared to Bill, anyway. Okay, so after Penrith, you went to London?”

  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” Jay said.

  “Like how you met Bran along the way,” Annette said. “You and that soldier rescued him from some of Quigley’s people. I’ve got to get her to teach me sign language.”

  “It’s useful when fighting the undead,” Jay said.

  “And you and Tuck got to London. Then, a few months later, Nilda and Chester arrived.”

  “Yeah, but lots of other stuff happened in the meantime,” Jay said.

  “Like?” Annette asked, her pen poised.

  “Um… well, I guess we moved from a radio station to the Tower of London. Sort of. I mean, that’s when Mum turned up. After that, we tried a lot of stuff. Looking for food, supplies, and a way to make the Tower work. We went to Kent for fruit. That’s when we found all those kids. They were at a boarding school down there. There were hundreds of survivors with them at first, but by the time we got there, it was basically just the kids left. We got them back to the Tower, and then we decided we had to make contact with Anglesey.”

  “And that’s when Eamonn went north?” Annette asked.

  “No, we were betrayed first. By Graham and McInery. People died. Chester got shot. Almost went blind.”

  “But you dealt with them,” Annette said. “And then Eamonn left.”

  “It wasn’t as easy as that,” Jay said, increasingly defensive as months of hard struggle were reduced to a brief and bare few lines. “But yeah. Chester was meant to hike to Anglesey but he was still recovering from the gunshot. So Eamonn went instead. He just sort of sneaked away. We were going to send more people, but then George Tull arrived in that small yacht, with Norm Jennings, Viola Denby, Lorraine, and Dr Harabi. That’s when Chester and Greta set out in search of Eamonn.”

  “Ending up in Birmingham where they found Sorcha Locke, and those other survivors,” Annette said.

  “What happened to them?” Jay asked. “The people from Birmingham?”

  “Oh, they went to Elysium, Kempton’s old farm in the southwest of Ireland near Kenmare Bay,” Annette said. “A lot of people went there with a lot of the small fishing boats.”

  “Where Eamonn and Greta went?” Jay said. “Cool.”

  “And while Chester was with us in Anglesey, you went to the Isle of Sheppey?” Annette asked.

  “That’s right,” Jay said. “There’s diesel there, you know. In the car import place.”

  “George told me,” Annette said. “And you got bitten. That was careless.”

  “Wasn’t the first time,” Jay muttered.

  “And then Leon had to rescue you,” Annette said.

  “No,” Jay said. “That’s not how it was. Leon brought small ships for us, that’s all. Four of them, plus the boat George Tull had brought made five. While we were waiting for the ships, we went to the Isle of Sheppey. The fuel was in the cars ready to be driven off for sale. And the only reason Leon was captaining the small boats was because of Pierre and Giselle Dupont. They’re this old couple from France. From somewhere near where Leon grew up. They knew each other from before. Like long, long before the outbreak. Anyway, Pierre and Giselle had a granddaughter, Simone, who was at school in England. And we have a Simone, one of the kids we rescued from that school in Kent. When Chester was on Anglesey, he sort of mentioned that, and things got confused. Leon, and Pierre and Giselle, they all thought that it was the same Simone. But that’s why Leon came to London, not to rescue us, but to bring Pierre and Giselle who thought their granddaughter was there.”

  “But it was a different Simone,” Annette said.

  “Yeah, that was a bit sad. What are the odds that two kids from France with the same name and the same age would be at school in Kent?”

  “The odds can’t be that long,” Annette said. “Not if it happened.”

  “True,” Jay said. “Wait, shh.” They sat in silence as feet rumbled along the corridor outside. “There’s something you’ve missed in your story.”

  “What?” Annette asked.

  “The horde got to London before Leon did. We had to flee in the Golden Pelican and the—”

  “In the what?”

  “The kids renamed our five boats,” Jay said. “After the ships Francis Drake took when he circumnavigated the world. That’s a long story.”

  “Is it an important one?” Annette asked.

  “I guess not. Anyway, we had to flee in that boat and a co
uple of rafts, rowing down the Thames faster than the zombies could… well, float, I guess. That’s where we met Leon, sailing towards us.”

  “So he did rescue you,” Annette said.

  “He collected us,” Jay said. “That’s all.”

  “And then what happened?” Annette asked.

  “Um… well, we went to Sheppey, and got a bit of diesel, and then crossed the sea, ending up in Ostend. The harbour was a real ruin. We sailed down the coast to Nieuwpoort where we found the cruise ship and the Royal Navy amphibious assault ship.”

  “The Ocean Queen and the HMS Courageous,” Annette said. “And?”

  “And… well, then you arrived in this ship, from Dundalk. Then Chester, Sorcha, Bill, and Captain Fielding arrived in their small boat from Calais, and… well, now here we are.”

  “Okay…” Annette said, jotting down a few more notes. “That’s useful. Thanks. Was it really that bad? London?”

  “I dunno. I mean, yeah, it was bad, but not as bad as Penrith.”

  “That’s where I… me and Daisy, we came from London. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Jay shrugged. “Now, after all this time, I guess it’s the same as anywhere else. You saw them, didn’t you?”

  “Saw who?”

  “Dead zombies,” Jay said. “In Dundalk, you saw hundreds of them. Just dead. Not killed.”

  “You mean you haven’t seen any that have just died?” Annette asked.

  “Sure. I guess. But not loads all together, not so many that it’s proof they can all die. One day soon, they’ll all be dead, and we can… not go home, but we could go back to London.”

  “Like Starwind says, soon is like pain. You don’t know how long it will last until it’s over, and it can get worse before it gets better.”

  “Starwind? You mean the girl Chester met in France?” Jay asked.

  “No, the real Starwind, from the anime show. You’ve not seen it? You should. It’s really good. We were watching that, me and Daisy, when our ship ran aground in Dundalk.”