Surviving The Evacuation (Book 3): Family Read Free

big place,” Kim said.
    “Not big enough.”
    “England got lucky then,” I murmured.
    “If you want to call this luck,” Sholto replied.
    “Let’s focus,” Kim said. “Avoid the editorialising. What are they going to find if they follow the coast up to Scotland? What would we find? A radioactive desert?”
    “I’ve no idea. They might get lucky. There must have been some survivors, but whether they’re still there now, I couldn’t say. And as to where’s safe in the long term, I couldn’t say that either.”
    “So we just have to hope they didn’t get to Scotland. Where else is there?”
    “You mean where they might go?” Sholto asked. “You know them better than I do.”
    “No, I meant in the world. Places you’ve seen, the places you’ve been through. Places we could go after we find the girls.”
    “Well as I said, there’s this village in Ireland, but if I get a vote it’ll be for crossing the Atlantic and going back to the US. These islands are too small. Too many nuclear weapons were dropped on them to make anywhere here safe enough for my liking.”
    “The same has to be true for the US, doesn’t it?” I asked.
    “You’re forgetting two things,” he said. “It’s a much bigger country, and I know where the bombs were going to be dropped. Maybe a few went off course, and you’ve got to factor in the unpredictability of fallout, but Crossfields Landing was fine when I left.”
    “That’s that town in Maine where you sailed out from?”
    “Right. I kept a summerhouse up there. Well, I say summer, they think snow and ice makes for a warm day. Owning a small boat seven hundred miles from DC gave me a legitimate excuse to disappear for a few days at a time. And sometimes I did actually go there, and a few times I even went fishing. Not that I ever caught much. After the outbreak, after Prometheus, after the agents on my trail finally decided that there were bigger priorities than treason, that’s where I went. There was this kid who’d inherited an old tackle shop, the summer before last. Him and a few friends had dropped out of high school, hitched their way up there. Anyway, by the time I reached the town they’d turned the place into a...”
    “Just get to the point,” Kim cut in. “How many people were there?”
    “About sixty. Give or take.”
    “And that was months ago. Too long. Too much could have happened. You’ve no idea if anyone is left at all.”
    “And no reason to suspect otherwise. That was about a month after the outbreak, and sure that’s a long time. But since it all started in New York, that means it was a month after everyone in the world started heading away from that corner of the East Coast. I mean, who in their right mind would actually head in that direction?”
    “Exactly,” Kim muttered caustically. “Yet that’s where you want us to go.”
    “They’re good people. Look, it’s just one option, and I think it’s a better bet, long term, than some village on a rainy island on the wrong side of the Atlantic.”
    “Maybe,” she said dismissively. “That’s sixty people. Sixty. And Scotland’s gone, England’s a wasteland. Where else? I mean, how many people are there left?” Kim asked, again.
    “In the whole world? I’ve no idea. I can only tell you what I saw getting to the Atlantic and then crossing it.”
    “Then just tell us how many people you know about.”
    “You want a number? Let’s see. There’s Captain Mills and his crew on the HMS Vehement. They lost a few when the naval battle kicked off, but there were about ninety left. Then there’s the Santa Maria, Sophia Augusto’s fishing trawler. They had a crew of twenty five bolstered by another sixty family, friends and hangers on. Another hundred or so survived from the flotilla. And then there’s another hundred in that village on the Irish coast.”
    “So, in total, as far as you know, that’s just four or five hundred people. Out of how many? A billion? More? And