Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home Read Free Page A

at the local supermarket. On the 20 th February it had all changed with the broadcast of the attacks in New York. She’d only realised something was wrong when the phones of everyone in the queue at her till had started pinging and buzzing. Everyone’s heads had looked down, fingers had moved as links were opened, and then mouths had dropped open and she’d heard tinny screams from the handsets.
    “What?” she’d asked. “What’s happened?”
    It was only when one of the customers had turned her phone around that Nilda had seen for herself. The screen was small, the image shaky, but it showed a woman falling off the roof of a mall to land in the parking lot below. Somehow she survived the fall only to be ripped apart by one of the… Nilda hadn’t known they were zombies, and probably they weren’t. Not really. But that was what they had called them. The fictional horror that had delighted so many on a late evening had become their horrific reality.
    Some of the customers had abandoned their shopping trolleys and run out to the car park. Others had run back into the shop and started to empty the shelves. A few tried to pay, but most just took what they could and pushed straight past the security guard, himself engrossed in his own screen.
    The manager had closed the store soon after, and she’d returned home, only to find Jay with his headphones on, lost in some computer game, oblivious to the terrible news. They’d sat together in their small living room, glued to the screen as the news came in. News wasn’t the right word; it was mostly speculation. The only real information came from what they could glean from the shaky footage filling the screen behind the equally shaky anchor.
    They hadn’t joined the evacuation. There had been something about the government plans she hadn’t trusted. Instead they’d stayed in Penrith, gathered supplies and other survivors, and tried to create a redoubt. But the undead had come, she and Jay had been separated, and she’d believed he was dead.
    Fleeing a horde, she’d been stranded on a Scottish island. Those who’d rescued her from the Atlantic had all died of radiation poisoning. Months had gone by, but then she’d been impossibly rescued, taken to Anglesey, and there discovered her son hadn’t died all those months before. With Chester, she’d returned to her old home in Penrith only to discover a note from Jay saying he and Tuck had gone to London. She and Chester had headed south to Hull. They found a lifeboat, and followed the coast until they reached the old capital. She’d been reunited with her son, and there had been a glorious moment when her life had once more seemed full of possibilities, and now…
    “That’ll do,” Fogerty said.
    “It will?”
    “It’ll have to. The rest is up to him.”
    Chester’s chest rose then fell, and then there was a pause just a heartbeat too long, that made her think there wouldn’t be another breath.
    “Isn’t there anything else we can do?” she asked.
    “We’ve stopped the bleeding,” Fogerty said. “We can keep him comfortable, but that’s all. We could try a transfusion, but we’d need to know his blood type. And I’ll be honest, I’ve seen a battlefield transfusion done, but I’ve never tried doing one myself.”
    She breathed out, and as she did, found her hands began to shake. “It just seems so unfair,” she murmured, looking down at Chester.
    “You want unfair?” Fogerty asked. “Then how about the story that surrounds those children. How many people were originally in that mansion? About eight hundred? And every few days someone left, heading west, looking for help, right? And they all died, didn’t they?”
    “Chester said they didn’t get to Anglesey, and Jay said they didn’t get to London.”
    “There you are. They were killed by the undead, but in doing so they led the zombies away from the kids. Their deaths had meaning. They kept them safe.”
    “And Chester’s, what meaning