Autumn exodus, p.2
Autumn - Exodus, page 2
But what David could now see happening closer to the Tower of London was worrying him most of all. They had perhaps another five minutes on the water, and he could see that the group had made good progress evacuating the Tower. All around them, though, there were other signs of movement. Some of the dead had escaped the worst of the heat and the flames, and in the space where Sam and Joanne were working between the walls of the Tower and the pier, a few cadavers had now begun to rise up in deliberate response to the increased activity around them. He watched as a lone figure lying in a shallow pool of gore slowly hauled itself back upright, breaking the thin crust that had formed from the residue of others on top of it. It stood and swayed, clearly contemplating its next move, dripping with muck like it had crawled out of a tar pit. And though it was just a single corpse with barely any physical strength, the impact of its determined resurrection was considerable. The shift in its position created sudden pockets of space around it that allowed other similarly preserved monsters to begin to rise. At the same time, when the foul-looking thing took an unsteady step forward, it caused panic in a crowd of evacuees who were trying to get down the steadily shrinking path that had been cleared to get them to the pier.
#
‘He’s coming in a bit fast, don’t you think?’ Sam said. Chapman had sailed past the jetty and turned the party boat around under the arches of London Bridge, and though he looked to be on a good course for the pier, his speed seemed excessive.
Joanne didn’t even look up from her digging. As fast as she was clearing the path, the dead were re-filling it again. ‘As long as he slows down enough for us to get on, who cares?’
Sam threw his shovel down and pushed his way to the front of the crowd now gathering on the pier. ‘Stay back until he’s docked,’ he told them. He was relieved when he heard Chapman finally cut the engines, but the boat still seemed to be coming in at a hell of a speed. He could see David up on deck now, coiling the mooring line, ready to throw it ashore and secure the ship.
A metre and a half away from the jetty.
Still too fast.
‘Throw it to me,’ Sam yelled, and David hurled the hawser across the gap. It landed near his feet and immediately began whipping away, but Ruth was there too, and she managed to catch it. Between the pair of them they got a good grip on the line. Other people who could see what was happening tried to help, some adding their hands to the rope, others wrapping their arms around Ruth and Sam’s waists to stop them being dragged into the river.
Chapman put the engine in reverse, cursing himself for not doing it sooner, but they were already in danger of overshooting the jetty. Ruth had managed to wrap the rope several times around the mooring, but the boat was still moving downriver. On deck, David raced to the stern and threw another rope ashore. Lisa almost caught it, but it slipped through her fingers. Without another anchor, the bow of the London Sunset clipped the end of the jetty then came to an unsteady stop, completely out of position, but finally stationary. ‘Fuck it,’ David shouted down. ‘That’ll have to do. Get everyone onboard now. The dead are coming!’
It was a blessing that the folks on dry land didn’t have the same view as he had from up on the deck, because there would have been absolute bedlam if they’d realised the number of corpses that were now dragging themselves back up onto their feet and advancing towards the group. Those that were mobile might only have been a fraction of the vast total, but their numbers were irrelevant; right now, even a handful looked like a horde. They tripped through the slop, stumbling across the churned remains of their brethren. A handful or a hundred, it didn’t matter. They were closing in.
Standing on the edge of the pathway they’d cleared, with one foot in the rot and the other on dry ground, Gary swung his machete wildly at the nearest of the ghastly upright creatures, splitting the paper-thin skin of its distended abdomen. Through their swaying shapes he saw that the bow of the boat was head-on to the riverbank, making it difficult for people to get onboard via the jetty as planned. They’d need an alternative route. ‘Get some ladders down here,’ he screamed at anyone who’d listen.
Sanjay had seen some ancient-looking wooden ladders in the White Tower, part of a display, and he was sure he’d also seen a couple of sets of aluminium stepladders knocking around the place since they’d been locked down last week. He ran back to find them, fighting against the tide of people still coming the other way. The plunge back into darkness once he’d reached the building was disorientating and he tripped and fell forward, the ground around his feet covered with filth. He fumbled through the ancient stone passageways, feeling his way along the rough walls.
Then he stopped.
There was something else in here with him.
He grabbed the knife he always carried, ready to slice through the corpse he felt sure was about to attack. ‘Don’t,’ it said.
He stepped back, almost losing his footing completely when he came up against another pile of abandoned junk. ‘Who’s that?’
They didn’t answer, but as Sanjay’s eyes became accustomed to the low light, he saw that there was a group of people still huddled in the dark. Despite them all being incarcerated in the White Tower together for days and, before that, holed-up in the Monument base for weeks, he didn’t immediately recognise any of them, couldn’t put names to the faces. They were part of a quiet, reclusive few who had preferred to remain isolated. They’d stayed apart, hidden in the shadows, trying not to get involved.
‘You need to get out of here,’ Sanjay said. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘We’re not going,’ one of them said. It was a woman, and when the limited light caught her, he saw that she was pregnant. He’d seen her around; she’d already been a couple of months along when he’d first arrived at the Tower.
‘Look, we don’t have time to piss around here. Chapman’s got us a boat. We’re leaving now.’
Someone else switched on a torch. Christ, there had to be twenty people in here. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’
This was someone Sanjay recognised. It was Nick Hubbard. He’d been one of Piotr’s lot, often helping Mihai, the group’s quartermaster. Had they left him behind, or had he had a fit of conscience when his bunch had taken the clipper and abandoned the rest of the group?
‘Come on, Nick. Don’t be stupid.’
‘There’s no point running. You go if you want, Sanjay, but it’s gonna be just as bad wherever you go.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘No, and neither do you. We’ve got some food, we’ve got this place, we’ve got each other. We don’t need nothing else.’
And although a thousand thoughts were running through Sanjay’s head, a thousand things he thought he should say, he instead said nothing.
Not my fucking problem.
He grabbed the long wooden ladders he’d been looking for and ran back to the others, terrified he’d missed the boat.
Outside, the channel that had been dug through the undead mire was narrowing again. It was as if the barely distinguishable body parts were reaching across the gap, desperate to reconnect with each other. ‘Get that frigging ladder over here now!’ Gary screamed at Sanjay as he weaved through the chaos. Things had deteriorated in the few minutes he’d been away. Now, more people were spaced along the jetty, holding onto various ropes that had been thrown down from the deck of the ship, doing everything they could to keep it from drifting. ‘Sanjay!’ Gary screamed at him again. ‘Now!’
Ruth was gesturing for him to get the ladders down to the end of the pier so they could use them to bridge the gap between the floating structure and the side of the boat. She snatched them from him, and he was immediately shunted back, pushed out of the way by a swarm of folks desperate to leave. Ruth held the bottom of the ladder and swung the other end over to David who wedged it into the railings on the deck. He’d barely got it secure before people were using it to scurry up to safety, the wooden ladder bowing and groaning under their weight. Sanjay lost his balance and gripped the side of the pier to steady himself, before realising it wasn’t him off kilter, it was the pier. The entire structure felt like it was about to collapse into the river.
Back on the footpath, Orla and Gary were frantically defending the space that Sam and Joanne had managed to clear. Even more of the dead were approaching now. Gary hacked at another foul ghoul then flung wet chunks of its sliced-up frame out of the way and into the river. In the sliver of clear space now ahead, he watched in horror as another rancid cadaver began rising. It didn’t have the strength to stand fully upright, so instead just dragged itself along on the stumps of its knees. The sudden pocket of space it created gave two more carcasses enough room for manoeuvre, and they too started to shift their sloppy bulks.
Someone close by let out a piercing scream.
Sam spun around and wrestled with a horrifically decayed skeletal thing that had grabbed hold of the woman standing behind him. The corpse was dealt with quickly, but the terror was infectious, spreading like a bushfire through the group of people still jostling for position in the escape line on the footpath. He could see folks scrambling up the ladder from the jetty, but they weren’t moving quick enough, and a bottleneck had formed. With a couple hundred people still to shift, they needed to speed things up.
Weakened by the impact of the boat and under increasing strain, the end of the pier creaked then began to tip. It dropped by half a metre, a sudden downward lurch that caused another wave of panic to tear through the crowd. The guy who’d been halfway across the ladder was thrown sideways and landed in the heavily polluted waters below. A couple of people looked for him, but he was already gone, swept away by the current and lost among the once-human flotsam and jetsam that now covered much of the surface of the Thames. People surged forward to take his place on the ladder. That the pier would soon collapse and break free of its moorings felt inevitable.
Chapman found a safety ladder on the boat and unfurled it down the bow, as close to the bank as he could. There was a narrow strip of shingle between the wall along the footpath and the water. People began climbing over the railings, dropping down hard then immediately picking themselves up again and stretching for the bottom rungs of the safety ladder. Packed up supplies and belongings were also hurled over the wall, boxes and crates hitting the gravel riverbank with wet thuds. ‘Leave all that,’ Joanne said, and while some people listened, others desperately clung onto their last possessions, deadweight from a lost world.
A second safety ladder appeared and was unfurled. Sam tried to marshal the crowds still on the footpath, doing what he could to divide them equally between the different routes to safety that had now been established. He shouted instructions, but no one was listening. Could they even hear him? The noise out here this morning was becoming uncomfortably loud – constant screams and shouts combined with the roar of the current and the sound of the boat’s idling engine. The cacophony was causing more of the dead to emerge from their bizarre hibernation. He’d assumed that the endless urban undead had been burned and welded into position, congealed by the heat, but many had been preserved under the burnt crust of countless others. In places, entire sections of the featureless mass undulated as more of them reacted to the chaotic noise. He thought he’d seen all the horrific sights the world could throw at him, but Christ, some of these monsters were more repulsive than anything his nightmares could conjure. Their rotting flesh had been hardened by the heat; grotesque sneers permanently baked onto what was left of their faces. Others were incomplete, limbs missing, features eaten away by fire and decay, and yet they continued their unsteady advance towards the living.
There was a groan of straining metal followed by a loud, splintering crack as the pier continued to collapse. The section that had been damaged by the collision with the boat threatened to break free from the narrow end of the structure that remained anchored to the shore.
Sam hacked down another trio of loathsome, dripping corpses so that he had a clear view back to the entrance to the Tower. A final few folks were stepping gingerly through pools of flesh where the path that he and Joanne had dug had finally sealed itself up again.
We must be nearly there now.
He looked down over the wall and realised there were still around a hundred people waiting down by the river, fighting for space in the narrow strip between the wall and the water. There was a smaller crowd on the unsteady jetty and a decent number had already made it up onto the deck of the boat. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind, but he instinctively scanned the crowds because there were people here that he cared about, people he’d already sacrificed his own safety to save by blocking London Bridge with a bus, then again trying to get back here via the Thames Tunnel. He saw Ruth on the jetty, helping Selena, Omar, and a couple of other kids to get across the ladder, and there was Dr Liz Hunter with Orla helping others climb the safety ladders. On the boat, he could see David and Chapman helping people up and over, and down on the jetty, Gary and Sanjay were ushering the last few stragglers along. Joanne caught his eye and he gestured for her to find a way onto the boat now too. Was that everyone accounted for?
Where’s Vicky?
She was still on the footpath, looking back in the direction of the Tower, watching the dead. She recoiled when he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Come on, Vic. We need to get going.’
She nodded, but still didn’t move.
‘Look at it.’
She gestured at a corpse standing a few metres away from her. Sheets of sloughed flesh had peeled away from its torso and were fluttering in the wind like loose gauze. The creature appeared to be mired in the goop, stuck, unable to move. It was staring back at her, a bizarre standoff.
‘Now’s not the time,’ Sam said, and he tried to move her along, but she shrugged him off.
‘I think it’s looking at me,’ she said.
‘Plenty of time for corpse watching from the boat,’ he said, and he led her to the railings at the edge of the footpath and lifted her down. She was light, like a ragdoll, barely any meat left on her bones.
Sam felt skeletal fingers scraping down his back. The ghoul that Vicky had been studying had broken free from its moorings. It had barely any strength, yet it came at him with such ferocity that it almost knocked him over the top of the railings. He swung his fist and his hand sank into what was left of its face. He caught it as it crumbled to the ground then hurled it into a crowd of several others that were trying to fight their way towards him. He realised he was the only one left on the footpath now.
Fucking typical.
Sam climbed over the railings and lowered himself down. His hands were still slippery with gore, and he fell the last metre. A vicious dagger of pain shot up along his injured leg that took his breath away. Joanne called out to him for help and when he looked up, he saw that Marianne was frozen halfway up the closest ladder, unable to keep climbing. She was in a bad way - tired, unfit, unwell, afraid – and the few people waiting behind her to escape showed no compassion whatsoever. Sam pushed through them, dragged someone off the bottom rung, then climbed as high as he could and unceremoniously shoved Marianne’s backside upwards, helping her get high enough so that Joanne and David could reach down and pull her up the rest of the way. He followed her up, much to the disgust of those still waiting. He was past caring. People had to learn to help themselves.
He collapsed on the deck, his leg in agony. When he looked back, he saw a corpse fall over the top of the railings and land like a sack of rotten fruit. Those people still waiting to get up the ladder recoiled from the monster in the mud. It had snapped its spine in the fall, but it continued to attack regardless. ‘Deal with it!’ Sam screamed. It hooked a wizened claw around a man’s ankle, and he panicked, struggling to shake it off.
‘Thank you, Sam,’ Marianne said. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
He wasn’t interested in small talk. He pointed down at the people he’d left behind. ‘They’ve got to learn to fight.’
‘We’re not all like you, Sam. Some of these people are terrified. I’m terrified. It doesn’t come naturally. We can’t all fight the way you do.’
‘With the greatest respect, Marianne, right now we don’t have the luxury of choice.’
Orla pushed her way through the crowd to get to the troublesome corpse. She stamped on the monster’s upturned face, instantly ending its dogged resistance. Another one landed at her feet and she punted it into the river. It flapped and splashed furiously as the grey waters of the Thames carried it away.
‘See,’ Sam said to Marianne. ‘She gets it.’
David pushed past them both and leant over the bow of the boat, keen to give Chapman the signal to get them away from this hellish place. It looked like most people had made it onboard now, but it was increasingly difficult to be certain. Up on the path along the front of the Tower, the area the group had cleared had been completely reclaimed by the dead. The congealed mass of rotting creatures had seeped into the empty spaces, and those that had been able to get up and move had crowded forward as far as the railings, blocking his view. Though the differences were stark close-up, from here it was hard to separate the living from the walking dead. They all stumbled forward desperately.
Elsewhere, other corpses remained anchored in the waist-high rot. They stood like scarecrows with their dripping arms outstretched, grasping furiously at thin air. They posed little immediate threat, but to David they were the ghastliest of all, pure nightmare fuel. And way beyond them, just visible on the outermost edges of the area that had been destroyed by fire, he could see yet more of them. They never stopped coming, never got tired. Jesus Christ, he thought, will we ever see the end of those fucking things?
The evacuation of the final few people from the pier was taking too long. Ruth, Gary, and Sanjay were trying to hurry things along, but the jetty felt increasingly precarious, and traversing the ladder was no easy task with both the pier and the boat moving unsteadily. ‘Gary, go!’ Ruth said, and she shoved him in the small of his back towards the ladder. He started making excuses, trying to get her to go before him, but she was having none of it. ‘Just fucking move!’
