Surviving the Evacuation, Book 17 Read online

  Surviving the Evacuation

  Book 17

  There We Stood

  Frank Tayell

  Reading Order & Copyright

  Surviving the Evacuation 17: There We Stood

  “Sometimes one candle alone isn’t enough to light the darkness.”

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2020

  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

  Book 17: There We Stood

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  http://www.FrankTayell.com

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  Synopsis

  As one year ends, and our old world fades into memory, a new future is born.

  On a frozen archipelago, where it is too cold to farm, a few thousand survivors from across the Atlantic have found a refuge. The arduous process of turning a sanctuary into a home begins once more for these weary travellers who’ve been chased from Britain, from Ireland, from France and Denmark. But their work is not yet done. The missing Marines cannot be left behind. The French and Ukrainians cannot be abandoned. The cartel can never be forgotten.

  As soldiers once again become civilians, the dangers of malnutrition replace the everyday spectre of starvation. Potential mutiny supersedes being overrun by the undead. Boredom replaces fear. Slowly, they relax, allowing themselves to enjoy the simple pleasure of music and plays, of weddings and births, of life without the imminent prospect of death. But all is not what it seems in the snowy wastes surrounding their town.

  While Europe is a zombie-filled radioactive wasteland, there are other continents. Other oceans. Other survivors. Other communities, just like their own, who will fight to keep what they’ve the clawed from the grip of the apocalyptic nightmare.

  Set in Northern Europe, Eastern Canada, and the tumultuous seas between, as one year ends, and a new civilisation dawns.

  Table of Contents

  Part 1: One Candle, Alone, to Light the Darkness

  Day 270, 8th December

  Prologue: Who Are We?

  Day 271, 9th December

  Chapter 1: Homecoming

  Day 272, 10th December

  Chapter 2: The Wedding

  Day 273, 11th December

  Chapter 3: Farewell

  Day 274, 12th December

  Chapter 4: Balance of Risks

  Day 275, 13th December

  Chapter 5: The Mass Graves of Killarney

  Day 276, 14th December

  Chapter 6: Counting Calories

  Chapter 7: Sales Pitch

  Day 277, 15th December

  Chapter 8: More Money, More Problems

  Day 278, 16th December

  Chapter 9: The Illusion of Normality

  Day 279, 17th December

  Chapter 10: Road Kill

  Day 280, 18th December

  Chapter 11: The Cost of Safety

  Chapter 12: Distant Battlefields

  Part 2: Apple Pie

  Day 281, 19th December

  Chapter 13: Spinach

  Day 282, 20th December

  Chapter 14: Snow Fishing

  Day 283, 21st December

  Chapter 15: Diana Fenton

  Chapter 16: The Frobisher

  Chapter 17: Eldorado

  Chapter 18: Santa’s Grotto

  Day 284, 22nd December

  Chapter 19: Phoenix Air

  Day 285, 23rd December

  Chapter 20: The Calculus of Survival

  Day 286, 24th December

  Chapter 21: A Post-Apocalyptic Eve

  Chapter 22: Root Beer Afloat

  Chapter 23: When Old Friends Meet

  Chapter 24: First Glimpse of Spring (Day 12, March 24th)

  Chapter 25: The Little Things

  Day 287, 25th December

  Chapter 26: An Apocalyptic Day

  Chapter 27: The Last Cornfield (Day 186, September 14th)

  Chapter 28: Are They Dead?

  Day 288, 26th December

  Chapter 29: America, Unboxed

  Day 289, 27th December

  Chapter 30: So Long, They Named It Twice

  Chapter 31: Below, Where’s Death?

  Chapter 32: Leaving New York Was Never Easy

  Day 290, 28th December

  Chapter 33: Atlantis

  Chapter 34: Hidden Rooms

  Day 291, 29th December

  Epilogue: Our Future

  Part 1:

  One Candle, Alone, to Light the Darkness

  Europe

  Day 270, 8th December

  Prologue - Who Are We?

  The Faroe Islands

  To begin, let me apologise for my appalling handwriting. Even though the cast is on my other arm, I shall place the blame squarely there for making it look as if a spider’s danced an inky jig across the page. It’s a while since I last recorded an entry for my journals. Back on Anglesey, in fact, which seems a million years ago, but it was only November 21st when my plane left Wales behind. Now, two and a half weeks later it seems a world away, but I’m only half an ocean and a quarter of a sea distant. Specifically, in the city of Torshavn, on the Faroe Islands.

  My brother found a nice house for us all. Compact without being small. Cosy. Warm. Grass-roofed. High-ceilinged. A home for a family, and so very different from our sprawling, knocked-through terrace on Anglesey. In its turn, Torshavn is ever so different from Holyhead. But it was back on Anglesey when I first considered the Faroe Islands as a potential home for humanity. The sub-Arctic temperatures, which will make farming next to impossible, crossed it off my list. Being shot will make anyone reassess their life, of course, but it made me reconsider how we live, and how we’ll transition from survival into that new way of life. Electricity is key, and it was the hydroelectric plant which brought us here.

  Sholto, Siobhan, and a squad of Marines were our advance-party, and discovered the town and the countryside beyond almost entirely free of the undead. However, these islands are not unoccupied. When Sholto and Siobhan went to the bridge linking this island with its neighbour to the east, they found a barricade, and they found people. A treaty of sorts has been negotiated with the locals. We can remain here, as long as we remain in Torshavn, and as long as we leave by the first of March. In return, we’ll get electricity and running water, though, so far, it has only been restored to under half of the town.

  We don’t know much about the locals. Sholto and Siobhan met three of them, Gunnar, Rigmor, and Rannvieg. Those three claim there are others, and they sen
d all decisions up to the Løgting, the ancient name of the Faroese’s equally ancient parliament. How many more locals survived here? Are they all from Faroe? We don’t know. In addition to the bridge, a recently completed tunnel connects this island with its eastern neighbour. The tunnel is sealed and we’ve been forbidden from using it. Is this because the locals are using it for food storage? Again, we don’t know. They gathered most supplies from the homes in this town, but did they do the same across the entire island, and on the other islands in the archipelago? As we are confined to the town, again, we don’t know.

  Added to this uncertainty is that some Irish survivors, once from Malin Head, arrived here before us. These are people from the community Siobhan and Colm left. After Kim and I met Siobhan, we travelled north with their group, to Malin Head, and found it empty. Our assumption at the time was that they had sailed west, towards the U.S. Now we know differently. The community in Malin Head came here, to Faroe. There was a confrontation. The Faroese soldier, Gunnar Niclasen, lost his leg, and the Irish were expelled. The Faroese don’t know of our, albeit tenuous, connection to Malin Head. Nor am I certain how best to address it when it becomes known to them. Deal with one problem at a time, I suppose, and we have more than enough to be getting along with.

  Food, though, is not one of them. Not immediately. We are virtually out of old world supplies, but the fishing is remarkably good, at least for now. So, for now, this week, we won’t starve. And who is we? Today, it is those of us who arrived aboard the super-yacht The New World. Tomorrow, our numbers will include those thousands aboard the Ocean Queen. Aside from a small crew on the HMS Courageous, and a skeleton guard aboard the barely afloat submarine, Vehement, and the USS Harper’s Ferry down in Kenmare Bay, that is it. That is us. Except this is an answer to where we are rather than who we are.

  Identity is less fraught an issue now than it once was, but it is just as difficult to answer. We were survivors from North America who made their way across the Atlantic by ship. We were US Marines, sailors, and civilians who made their way north from Cape Verde. We were English, Irish, Welsh, and Scot, French and Australian, and everywhere in between. Some were stranded when the outbreak hit, some were at the homes we’d known all our lives. Some gathered on Anglesey, some in the ancient fortress of the Tower of London. Now, we are learning to forget such immaterial differences and become something different. Something new. What that will be, what we will call ourselves, is of far less importance than where it is. At least until the first of March, it will be here. After that, I don’t know.

  We’ll have to scout the coastlines within reach, but there aren’t many left. Admiral Janet Gunderson brought the USS Harper’s Ferry up from Cape Verde where she’d recruited tourists and locals to bolster her ranks. On their journey north, they searched every harbour within reach. Sophia Augusto and the other survivors of the convoy that set out across the Atlantic before the nuclear war certainly can’t recommend anywhere on the American side of the ocean. We’ve satellite images of corners of Europe, and of the US, and, again, none suggest a glimmer of where we might find a new home. Nor can Captain Flora Fielding. We met her in Calais, but she spent the year since the outbreak on Ascension Island, and brought us knowledge of the southern Atlantic. The Falklands were overrun. South Africa is as much a desolate ruin as everywhere else.

  To this we can add our own recent sea voyage from Calais to Denmark, in which we found no survivors. Rather, we found no one friendly. All of which sounds grim. Perhaps unnecessarily so. We’ve found people here on Faroe, and though we didn’t receive the most friendly of welcomes, it is warmer inside than it was on the ship.

  After the plane crashed in France, we discovered survivors in the French town of Creil. In turn, they were found by a group of Ukrainians. They number over twenty thousand and, along with Sergeant Khan, Private Kessler, and Scott Higson, are on their way to an old military base in the Pyrenees. No, by now, they should have reached it. We’ll look for them. We’ll find them. Somehow. In their survival lies hope we’ll find other friendly faces, and the risk we’ll find more nests of evil like Calais, occupied by people as vile as the cartel. Originally, before the outbreak, they were called the Rosewood Cartel, and they were the murderous muscle behind the apocalypse the politicians wrought. After the outbreak, in France, they turned Calais into a slave camp, found tanks left behind by the French Army, and used those to storm north, as far as one of Kempton’s redoubts in Denmark. They were defeated. Which isn’t to say they are all dead, but any handful that survived are no threat to us. However, there will be others like that on this planet, and the next such threat might not be as easy to recognise.

  Once more, I’ve made it all sound rather grimmer than it is. We’ve a home until March with electricity and water. We’ve nearly three months to think and recover, and to negotiate a more permanent arrangement with the locals. It’s a lot more than we’ve had in the recent past.

  Compared to aboard ship, we’ve plenty of space. One thing that’s missing, and I didn’t notice until an hour ago, is a garden. My arm isn’t painful, as long as I don’t jar it, but the weight of the cast makes sleeping difficult, and sleeping in a bed impossible. I wanted to watch the stars while my feet were planted firmly on unmoving ground. At the front, the house lets out onto the pavement. We don’t have a curfew, but with so few of us in the town, and despite the glaring streetlights, there is a sense of danger that grows the closer I get to the front door. At the back is a small oblong of paved yard with a narrow fence dividing it from our neighbour’s equally small rectangle of outdoors. A yard is not a garden and little better than a car park, and so not a place to look upwards and consider the infinite possibilities of the universe. I considered climbing up to the grass roof for a brief bit of stargazing, except the cast makes climbing a ladder a near impossibility with a neck-breaking probability. Plus, it’s freezing out there, and getting so late it’s almost better to define it as early.

  The Ocean Queen will disembark its passengers later this morning. Tomorrow will be the joint wedding and a welcome party, which is an excuse for us to invite the Faroese, and so impress upon them that we are normal enough people. There are two key areas I want to push. The first, to allow us to search and secure the entire island. The second, access to the tunnels linking this island with the east. Being out of the weather, a tunnel would be ideal for hydroponics. I suspect that’s what the locals are already using it for, so perhaps we can trade seeds and labour for already grown food. Regardless, we’ll need to bolster our seed stock prior to any serious attempts at farming. I’m uncertain whether that can be here, but I’m just as uncertain whether it can be anywhere else. The weather is increasingly erratic, and I don’t know what will happen to the fish stocks after this year’s predator-free breeding boom. A year to build up our seed stock, to learn how to farm, to plan, that’s what I want from the Faroese. In return, we will offer them a berth if and when we leave here.

  As to where, if it’s not here, our next and final destination might be, it has to be somewhere with oil. My own preference is for the Mediterranean. Some among the admiral’s crew still wish to return to America, but everything we know tells us that place is as bad as Europe. Worse, even. Nevertheless, the Amundsen will head west after the wedding. Sholto will be aboard the old icebreaker, along with a small crew and larger shore party. They will inspect Iceland, Greenland, and then the northern coast of Labrador before circling Newfoundland and returning here. They will find nothing but ice, I’m sure of it. But it is worth confirming that now, while we have the luxury of time. When they return, another expedition will begin, to the United States. Another will go to the Mediterranean, via the Bay of Biscay, where, hopefully, we will make contact with Scott Higson and the French and Ukrainian survivors.

  The Courageous is also on its way to Torshavn. I’m not alone in thinking it’s unwise to have all our ships here, but it is simpler to refuel from shore than at sea. Again, it is the admiral’s decision. Once refuelle
d, the Courageous will head south, back to Kenmare Bay, to collect the skeleton crew left aboard the immobile Harper’s Ferry, and the barely-afloat HMS Vehement. Mister Mills should have scuttled his submarine weeks ago, and yet he has not. That, though, is something I can do nothing about.

  There is a lot of work ahead of us. A lot of planning. Preparing. Whether this is a beginning, an end, neither, or both, the next year is fast approaching, and tomorrow is approaching far faster. And so I must, despite everything, attempt to get a little sleep.

  Day 271, 9th December

  Chapter 1 - Homecoming

  The Faroe Islands

  What a day it’s been. Exhausting doesn’t begin to describe it, but today was a success. The Ocean Queen eased into the harbour around eight a.m., which is… gosh, only twelve hours ago. I assumed it was later. Yes, an exhausting day, and tomorrow we have the wedding, so I will keep this entry brief.

  Our little household was awake before six. Compared to everyone else, we slept in. But before seven, everyone was in position. Mary O’Leary was at the school. Sholto, Siobhan, and the squad with whom they’d arrived on Faroe were patrolling our internal perimeter. The deaf soldier from London, Tuck, had drafted another ten… another ten… I’m not sure what to call them. I was going to write sailors, but they weren’t a year ago. Nor were they soldiers, and I hope we have no need for those in the future. I can’t call them Londoners, because they’re mixed in with our people, or people who were with Kim in Dundalk. It is a puzzle, and it is getting late, so for now, let’s just call them people. They joined Sholto’s patrols, watching for the undead and making sure the new arrivals didn’t stray too far from the electrified part of town. Aisha and Felicity were running the kitchens at the indoor sports facility. Norm was aboard the motor launch, The Golden Pelican, acting as a pilot to guide the ship in, while the rest of us were shore-side, watching, mouths agape.