Blood Roots: Are the roots strong enough to save the pandemic survivors? Read Free Page B

peninsula.
    Nicole looked nervously at her grandfather.
    ‘We’ll be fine,’ he assured her. ‘We’re safe on the horses.’ Despite his assertion, he led them off the main highway and along the loop road that led through the outskirts of Silverdale, keeping them well clear of the barking dogs. They relaxed a little once they joined what had been the motorway leading to Auckland and could no longer hear the dogs.
    The lush carpet of weeds creeping across the motorway meant easier going for the horses. Two hours later they picked their way through a barricade blocking the Upper Harbour Highway turnoff. The scores of burnt-out and abandoned cars, together with the hundreds of skeletons on each side of the barricade, was a grizzly reminder of the anarchy that had reigned in the aftermath of the pandemic. As they made their way towards Greenhithe they came across several more barricades, but they were smaller and the skeletons fewer.
    ‘Time to rest,’ Mark announced late in the afternoon as he headed his horse down an overgrown farm track towards a barn a few hundred metres from the highway.
    ‘I can keep going, Granddad,’ Zach said, puffing out his chest.
    ‘Me too,’ Nicole boasted.
    Mark could see they were both exhausted. They had been so excited about the journey that neither had slept much the previous night. ‘We need to rest the horses,’ he explained. ‘We don’t know how far we’ll need to travel before we find a yacht.’
    The barn door was padlocked. Mark took the farrier’s hammer from his packhorse’s pannier and smashed it off. Ripping away tall weeds, they struggled to move the heavy door. When they had forced the door open a few centimetres they squeezed through. Slowly their eyes grew accustomed to the dim light filtering through the rusting corrugated-iron roof.
    Nicole screamed, Zach gasped and Mark pushed them both back out the barn door. He too had seen the cages, and the human skeletons with missing bones lying on the tables. He only hoped his grandchildren hadn’t seen the smaller remains on the table furthest from the door.
    He led the party back down the farm track to a small shed which had previously sheltered bobby calves. It was cloudy, there was a light northerly blowing and though it was August, it wasn’t cold. They pitched camp, tended to the horses, lit a fire and cooked their supper.
    The children were subdued, and Mark was relieved they didn’task questions about what they had seen in the barn. Despite their earlier boasts they crawled into their sleeping bags as soon as it was dark.
     
    While Mark was cooking breakfast he heard Nicole call ‘No, no, no!’ in her sleep. He sometimes wondered if she was as tough as she made out. It was the smell of the cooking that eventually woke the children from their fitful sleep.
    ‘Will we get to Epsom today?’ Zach asked as he stretched his arms and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
    ‘Our first priority is to search for a yacht.’
    ‘But we will be going to Epsom, won’t we?’ Nicole persisted.
    ‘Of course we will.’
    It was late morning by the time they reached the Upper Harbour Bridge at Greenhithe. Mark was relieved to find it still standing, although the approach road was jammed with abandoned vehicles. He searched the anchorage area to the east of the bridge with his binoculars. Not a single yacht had survived. To the west, the houses on Herald Island had all been swept away too despite being so far up the estuary. For the rest of the day they struggled to force their way across the bridge. They tied ropes to the horses and used them to drag vehicles out of their way. In the centre of the bridge they were faced with a particularly large truck that had jackknifed. Despite being empty, it took all the horses’ strength together with their own efforts to drag it the few centimetres necessary to allow the horses a gap to squeeze through. Once it had been moved, Mark and Zach slumped down on a rusted car bonnet to