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

great. It looked like they had been moved around so that the evacuees could be directed into different walled-off enclosures. When one was full, the barriers would be moved so the next enclosure could be filled. And those walled-off enclosures, there were dozens of those still standing, but I couldn’t see inside from where I stood. Their walls were too high. I crept closer, to an old spreading oak jutting out at the edge of a field. I had to climb it to see inside.” He coughed. “I mean that I had to see. I had to know. To do that, I had to climb a tree. Inside those walls were bodies. Hundreds upon hundreds. All the evacuees…” he trailed off.
    “Seb, it’s alright, if you don’t want to—”
    “No, it is important you know. The evacuees weren’t shot. Either it was the vaccine itself or some biological weapon. I don’t suppose it matters which. Those people had gone seeking safety. They had trusted the government, and they had been betrayed. And there was nothing I could do. I just stayed up that tree watching and trying to understand how it all came to pass. How the soldiers and the police could have let it happen.”
    “Does that mean they knew?” Jay asked. “That the government planned all this?”
    “Wait, I haven’t finished. But, yes, someone had planned for something. Those signs, the fences, and all those spare military uniforms, it all suggests that they were preparing for some truly terrible act. Whether it was for this exact eventuality or not is immaterial. They saw the danger and came up with an elegantly savage solution. The ranks of the undead grow when people are infected. And the undead are hard to kill, but people are not, so the easiest way of reducing the number of zombies on our island is to kill the population before it turns. It is elegant, and simple and the purest evil. The noise I’d heard, that was the sound of bulldozers toppling the walls down onto the bodies. I watched as this pair of uniformed thugs sprayed something onto them. It was some type of incendiary. They lit it. And then, by the light of the pyre, I saw how many people were there. Including those in the vehicles and the two in the Towers, there were less than two-dozen personnel. I won’t call them soldiers, because that’s a disservice to those who… but I’m getting to that part. My world was in ruins. Everything I knew and believed had been torn from me. I was still in that tree, frozen with shock. I saw some people, more refugees, approaching along the road. Perhaps they had left later in the day so as to avoid the crowds. It was the person in the watchtower who spotted them first. He shouted a warning. An office on the ground called out an order. The man in the watchtower started arguing with him, whilst four others broke off from their clean-up duties and ran towards the evacuees. They stopped about twenty yards from the refugees, unslung their rifles, and opened fire. They killed them all, and there were children in that group. Children! The oldest couldn’t have been more than eight. Before the firing had stopped, the soldier in the watchtower had started climbing down. The moment his feet touched the ground, the officer in charge shot him in the head.”
    Nilda glanced at Jay. He was staring at the older man with horrified disbelief. She gripped her son’s hand, tightly.
    “I stayed up in that tree all night,” Sebastian said. “I suppose it was shock, but I was concealed well enough. When dawn came the thugs left, leaving nothing but smouldering ashes. I climbed down and again felt compelled to see. I walked in to the killing field. I’m glad I did. Mixed in with the bodies of the old and young and civilian, were uniforms. Dozens of them. Who exactly they were, I don’t know. Nor who gave the orders for them to be shot. But whoever it was, not everyone blindly followed them. I found some strength in that. I wandered there for a while, trying to burn those images into my soul. But the body is