Surviving The Evacuation (Book 4): Unsafe Haven by Frank Tayell Read Free Book Online

I’d passed a sign for a lay-by. It was a truck stop, not much more than a wide stretch of asphalt large enough for lorries to park up when they reached their daily maximum number of driveable hours. There were no trucks there, but there was a food van and a couple of portable toilets. I broke into the van, closed the door behind me, and sat on the floor. I’d only planned on staying there a few minutes, just long enough to boil up the last of my water and make some tea—”
    “Seriously?” Jay blurted. “You were going to use the last of your water to make tea?”
    “Of course. You wouldn’t understand. It’s the comfort of familiar ritual. But I didn’t make the tea. I fell asleep. When I woke it was half past ten. And, no, I didn’t then bother with the tea. I just drank the water and headed back up to the road. In my earlier exhaustion I’d not really thought about all those abandoned bicycles. There was at least one every four hundred yards, discarded when some part had broken. I found one with a punctured tyre near the gap in the fence. I dragged it along on one wheel for about three hundred yards until I came to another bike, this one with a broken chain. About five minutes after that I had a working bicycle. I left the evacuation route and cycled down the country lanes. There was a shortcut I knew that would get me to the Muster Point, and outside of a good meal, before the hour was out.”
    “They didn’t stop you?” Nilda asked.
    “At that point there was no one to even try. There were no police cars. No military vehicles. No evacuees. I didn’t pass a single soul nor did I see a solitary light, not until I was about a mile from my destination. I was on one of those single-lane farm-tracks, and I’d thought I’d become lost. It’s been a few years since I was able to spend my summers doing nothing but hiking around the border, but those old roads, they’ve been there for centuries. I wasn’t lost. I ended up exactly where I wanted to be. Through a gap in the hedgerow, and across the fields, I saw the lights. I knew it was the Muster Point but, for some reason, that knowledge wasn’t reassuring. I left the bicycle there and tramped across the corrugated earth. It wasn’t easy. The only light was coming from ahead of me. Perhaps because of that, because I was concentrating so much on where to put my feet, I didn’t become aware of the noise until I was clambering over a fence about a quarter of a mile from it.”
    “It was loud?” Jay asked.
    “No. That was the point. It should have been loud, but it wasn’t. There was just the gentle hum of generators mixed with the harsh growl of heavy-duty engines. There should have been the crying and groaning and growling of thousands of frustrated refugees. I couldn’t hear a single voice. I grew cautious. I continued on more slowly, keeping my head down, my shoulders hunched, following the fences and hedges until I was close enough to see. It was a camp. Searchlights mounted on towers of scaffolding picked out the road they’d used as the evacuation route. They must have been funnelling people in from both directions onto a slip road that led down into farmland. This slip road was split into two lanes, and each of those split again and again, each time the pathway down which the evacuees could walk became narrower and narrower. The fenced-in paths snaked up and down and back on themselves forming a horrific maze until, when the paths were so narrow that the people would be walking in single file, they reached the front and a row of desks. There was no one sitting behind them. I think that must have been where the evacuees were sorted and given the vaccine because a few dozen yards further on there was another row of barriers. These were far less intimidating, just the kind they used for crowd control at sports matches. You know the sort? About five feet high with a wide base, but designed to be knocked over if the weight behind them became too