“Grandpa?”

  Howard looked to his right and the bank of monitors above the desk, seeing the movement on one of them.

  Joe recognised those approaching the front gate through the grainy video feed.

  “They with you?” said Howard.

  Joe stood. “Yes. And that woman is exactly the person you need to speak to, to help get Ellie back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  JENN

  The white and grey building with the wide sloping roof at the end of the gravel path, was neat and well ordered apart from the lack of front door and a few bodies of the undead in front of it.

  A figure, then two were moving within the shadows of the hallway, one of the shapes defined enough to be recognised.

  “It’s Joe…” said Lauren.

  “I see that,” said Jenn looking through a small set of binoculars.

  “He’s with someone. They’re coming out.”

  The older woman placed the eyepieces in her jacket pocket. “Wait here, I’m going to approach alone.” She noticed Lauren’s reticence. “Joe doesn’t appear to be under any duress. But watch the road and woods for the undead.”

  She walked up the path, greeting the two men as they emerged from the entrance. The taller of the two walked past Joe to greet her and before she could speak, stood upright, saluting her in a sharp, crisp manner. She responded in kind.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I am General Howard Farnham, of the US airforce. Retied. Joe has told me a lot about you.”

  She lowered her hand walking closer. He shook it, while she smiled. “Good to meet you, General.”

  “Please, call me Howard.”

  “And you can call me Jenn. We can’t keep referring to each other as General. It might get a little confusing.” She noticed Joe look down with a smile.

  Howard looked back at Joe. “The major is a good man.” He then faced forward again. “You folks have had a hell of a time of it. Welcome to the United States. I wish you could see this country in better times…”

  “I’ve visited over the years. It’s a beautiful country and if there’s anywhere that can survive this disaster, it’s here.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened to yours…”

  Joe looked at Jenn. “Howard’s daughter has been taken by the same people that took Clara.”

  Jenn’s expression hardened. “Then we need to find her. How long ago was she taken?”

  “Three days ago.” He pointed to the road. “Ellie was standing near where your two people are now. I only saw a pickup driving off and no sign of her afterwards.”

  Jenn nodded. “The man with Clara, Aiden is his name. He saw the same thing. I’ve been thinking about a way to find out who is—” She turned around to the sound of heavy footsteps on the path, and Lauren approaching.

  “There’s a group of the undead approaching from the east, along the road.”

  Howard gestured to the building behind him. “I have a place we will be safe.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CLARA

  Clara’s hand still throbbed, the cuffs being replaced by cord holding her wrists together behind her back. Her ankles were also securely bound but there had been no blindfold this time nor was she gagged. Those that took her across the narrow sea crossing to the island told her this place was so remote it did not matter what she saw or how loud she screamed.

  She was in a bedroom. The posters and books on the shelves suggested perhaps it belonged to a teenager. The room was one of many in the sea front home, which must have belonged to someone extremely wealthy she thought. But for now, it was a prison.

  The questions she fired at those that piloted the small boat fell on deaf ears, they didn’t even seem to pay her any attention at all, as if they had kidnapped a woman a hundred times before. Instead, the only sounds were that of the outboard motor, wind, crashing waves and gulls.

  If there were people on the island, she did not see them during the short journey to the house, but she still feared the motivations of those that would go so far out of their way to abduct people, especially when there seemed a special interest in women. She always had a keen interest in history and those that took females usually only had one thing in mind.

  She lifted off the single bed, struggling to stay upright due to the rope around her ankles then looked for anything that could be used to tear at the threads. Her eyes shifted from edges of pieces of furniture, to the walls…

  A nail was sticking out, but it was around chest high, no way she could lift her wrists that high to catch it. She turned back to the bed, looking to the floor then window then back to the—

  The sound of the front door opening was followed by muffled voices, then footsteps on the stairs. Someone was approaching.

  She sat back down just in time for the bedroom door to open.

  A middle-aged woman, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt stood in the doorway smiling. “You’ve come such a long way, haven’t you?”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Why dear, you are where you are meant to be. You will come to see that in time.”

  “People will come looking for me. The kind of people you don’t want to meet.”

  The smile that seemed plastered to the older woman’s lips, did not falter. Another person that this situation seemed normal to. “Don’t be silly, no one can find you here. We take great precautions to make sure we stay hidden. Even before the recent events. No. This is your new home. The sooner you accept, the better for you. Are you hungry?”

  Clara looked down, hearing the floorboards creak outside the room, suggesting there were others out there.

  “Well, you should eat before you meet Michael. We like our woman to be agreeable during the first meeting.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  LAUREN

  The regurgitated bunker air smelled of tomato and candy to Lauren. Howard noticed her scrunching her nose up.

  “The scrubbers do a good job of weeding out radiation, but a bad job of making the place smell less. Had the same problem at Fort Jenkins. You get used to it after a few days.”

  Lauren meekly smiled then looked back to the recorded video on the monitor in front of her, which showed a pickup and a woman and man carrying a person to it.

  Howard’s face hardened. “When they took your friend, they must have come in on the north road, otherwise I would have picked them up on the camera near the gate. Fran and I have been watching these external cameras since they took Ellie, hoping they would make another appearance. We were beginning to lose hope until you folks showed up.”

  Lauren turned and smiled at the girl, maybe of twelve years of age who provided the best mug of coffee she had had, since being at the facility back in the UK. She wanted to tell the child that she would find her mother, but instead looked back at the monitor, rewinding the footage.

  Mathew leaned in closer to the screen then looked at the blinking lights on the computer hardware beneath the desks. “If you give me access to your system, I can probably whip up some code to enhance this footage. Might give us a better look at the people that took your daughter.”

  “You’re a coder?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Okay then. Sit at the end there, the final keyboard, that’s the only one that’s set up to mess with the internal systems. But I’m trusting you not to ruin anything else while you’re in there. Our existence down here depends on all these computers continuing to do their job.”

  Mathew nodded and moved away, Howard walking back to join Jenn, who was sitting at the dinner table in the middle of the room.

  Lauren turned to face them both. “What’s your external comms like? Do you have access to federal and military channels?”

  “I do…” He looked at the General. “If you would like to know something, you should just come out and ask.”

  Jenn smiled. “We would like to know if your military has any wish to return to this region of the country?”

  He sat back a little. “I guess you wouldn’t know the full situation, would you…” He sighed, turning back to Lauren. “Navigate to the folder marked ‘Broadcasts’ then open the subfolder marked ‘Wall.’ Sort by latest then click on the third from the top.”

  Lauren did so, then enlarged the video that began to show a view from the sky, perhaps from a helicopter, looking down upon a huge wall splitting the landscape, which was surrounded by even taller cranes, while construction vehicles milled around their base like ants.

  “What is that?” said Lauren, trying to tune her mind to the scale of the towering dull grey structure.

  “That is what now divides the country, running roughly down the centre of it. It runs north, south along the eastern border of six states, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Kansas City is the central hub and contains the only gate by which to pass through. The rest of the thousand miles of barrier, which is around two-hundred-feet high, has AI controlled weaponry, which deletes any of the dead that come within a half a mile of it. It’s a modern miracle of engineering…”

  Lauren wasn’t the only one confused. “But a wall, even one as big as that, can’t keep a virus out, especially one that’s carried by animals.”

  “Keep watching…”

  The helicopter flew over the wall and then into what appeared to be a landscape devoid of features. A smooth, desert-like ground which continued towards the west, for as far as the eye could see no matter where the cameraman pointed his camera.

  “There is something which kills the virus… it’s why they dropped the nukes on your islands. For a hundred miles west of the wall is an irradiated desert, where no living thing can exist. No plants, hell not even a microbe.”

  “That’s… remarkable,” said Jenn.

  “So, there’s no infection beyond that?”

  “There’s a smaller wall at the end of the desert, but similar in length, in case anything makes it across. As for those living in the states west of there? There’s a communication blackout. Whatever they are doing there, they are not telling the world about it.”

  Another issue popped into Lauren’s mind. “But… how did they evacuate so many people that far west in time? Before the…“ Howard’s expression gave her the answer.

  “You think your country was the only place where they would kill millions? Some did make it west, but a large number were simply killed before even getting to the wall.”

  “They didn’t even know if they were infected?”

  “From what I heard before the comms went down, was that the scientists gave the military, a distance within which there was a high likelihood that people would be infected. So they took them all out. No risks were being taken. Better to know those that lived far enough west would be virus free, and to start again with those people, then risk even one infection from those on the wrong side of the wall… Better dead than sorry, was their thinking. This was why I never evacuated. I knew it was a death sentence.”

  Jenn looked at the man across from her. “With respect, Howard. You still haven’t answered my question. Have the military any interest in this part of your country?”

  He looked ruefully at her. “Not that I know of.”

  Lauren chimed in. “So they’re not trying to eradicate everyone east of the wall? They are leaving it to the undead to take care of things?”

  “That’s my understanding.”

  Lauren continued. “Why not just nuke this side of the country?”

  “The nuclear fallout would be too devastating to the western states. It’s one thing to nuke an island at the edge of the Atlantic, a different matter to do it within the continental United States. But, who knows what they would do, so I wouldn’t rule it out completely.”

  Mathew looked at the group in the middle of the long room. “What about the other countries? Canada and Mexico?”

  “Mexico I don’t know anything about, but Canada built their own wall. Not as impressive as ours, but evidently it kept everyone and everything out, just as effectively.”

  Mathew looked back to his screen. “Let’s hope we won’t need to move from here…” As video footage played, an idea jumped into his mind. “Um… I think I have an idea.” He turned to the old man. “How many of those external cameras you got?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CLARA

  Clara’s stomach rumbled a little. She had been offered fried white-fish, but had refused, explaining the reason. She also initially refused the clothes she was offered, but it was made clear to her she had no choice but to change into the long, flowing white dress, which made her feel slightly queasy to wear.

  The car she was in slowed at a gated driveway, the road beyond bordered by tall, slim trees. On one of the gate’s stone columns was an embedded sign, mentioning a home for the elderly. Two armed men at the gate opened it, and the car drove forward towards a house, the largest and oldest she had seen on the island so far.

  The grounds the building resided in were orderly and clean. Sweeping, well cut lawns, broken up by vibrant blooms and singular trees. Amongst this vision of landscaping were women. All wearing what she was, all of similar age, as if she had been driven to some kind of hippy Nordic festival. The closer the vehicle got to the fountain which stood proud in front of the impressive entrance the more Clara was convinced of what she had been pulled into was a cult. It made sense for such groups to survive the apocalypse as they would have been paranoid about such an event, and probably planned for it. She had read about many such organisations from the mildly offensive to the wildly suicidal. Either way, this lot was obviously happy to use violence to enforce their way.

  Two large men with rifles slung over their shoulders, the only people not wearing white, were waiting alongside a thickset, older woman, who, like the woman that she had first met, had a preemptive smile. The rear car door was opened for Clara, who took in a deep breath, then got out, also smiling.

  “Ah, there she is! Turn around, turn around. Let me see you!”

  Clara’s restraint was already beginning to break, as was her smile but she did as requested, slowly pivoting, the effort causing some aches across her limbs which she did her best to hide.

  “I’m afraid we’ve already had breakfast, and lunch will not be until noon.”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Oh, that accent! I’m sure you have a fascinating story to tell. My name is Tilda Hollings, but you may call me matron. I’m in charge of all of the girls here at Crowbridge manor. By the look of you, you will make a perfect daughter of eden.”

  “Okay…”

  “Oh, look at you! I’m sure this is all very confusing. But do not worry yourself. You are home now. Later, when you are washed and fed, you will meet Michael.”

  If Clara had any food in her stomach, this is the point at which it would have vacated, but instead she nodded, forcing a smile to her lips.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CANDACE

  The doctor placed her hand on Liz’s stomach, followed by the stethoscope. “Breathe slowly in and out.”

  In Candace’s ears, a single heartbeat was quickly joined by another. She briefly smiled. “All sounds as it should. Have you been taking your vitamins?”

  Liz nodded. “All the pills. Pills on pills.”

  Tia giggled.

  “Keep that up. Any strange food cravings?”

  “Ha, not yet, thank god. If I did, the options are a bit limited, aren’t they?”

  “Aaron and the others found quite a bit of food in one of the local houses. So if you would like prunes with crisps or chips as the Americans say, we got you covered.”

  “Any coffee?”

  “I think there is.” Candace looked at the little girl busily scribbling, and the small pile of paper near her. “Are they for me?”

  Tia nodded. “I kept them sorted for you. The newest are at the top.”

  “Excellent.”

  Tia picked them up and handed them to the doctor, who got to her feet.

  “What… are you doing in the basement?” said the girl.

  Her mother continued the enquiry. “Since what happened to Ada, are you sure it’s safe?”

  “Safe as we can make it, but I need a place to do my work. I can’t just sit around this old house doing nothing. It helps me forget the past…”

  “I have a degree in micro-biology…”

  “I’d prefer you rested, but when I have things set up, perhaps we can discuss a role for you.”

  “Please let me know. I think we all need as much distraction as possible.”

  Candace walked to the door, smiling one more time at Liz, while glancing at Hope, then left the room. She quickly made her way downstairs to the kitchen and then lower still where the large subterranean room had been largely cleared of its shelving, which were now pushed up against three of the four walls, the fourth, the one with a tiny slit of a window, being reserved for a few single beds, where Jacob was sitting.

  Candace placed the drawings next to a small stack of similar illustrations. “The latest batch. Anything useful in the previous ones?”