Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion by Frank Tayell Read Free Book Online Page B

half a mile, and he’d taken it as the natural background hum of the city. After all, that low thrum of engines was a most familiar sound in London. He grabbed McInery’s arm.
    “You hear that?” he hissed.
    “What?” she snapped, shaking him loose. Then she stopped. Listened.
    “Machinery,” she said. “Heavy duty. Where’s it coming from?”
    He didn’t bother answering. It was obvious to them both that it came from the southwest, the direction of the River Thames.
    They managed another five hundred yards before they heard the voices. They ducked into an alley and listened, but they were too far away to make out any words. Reassured that the voices weren’t getting any nearer, Chester pointed at the roof of a tall building across the street. McInery nodded. Chester went to the edge of the alley, checking left and right, but there was no sign of any people, and judging by the still intact detritus littering the road, no vehicles had been down this way since the evacuation. He nodded to McInery, and they sprinted across the road. There was a sign on the inside of the door, ‘All students must show I.D.’ Once more wishing he had his lock picks, he levered the door open. Inside, his heart hammering, he stood to one side of the glass doors, peering down the street. He could still see no one. McInery had a resigned expression on her face. He thought it must match his own. They both knew what they would find, but they still went looking for a stairwell.
    When they got to the roof, their expectations were proved correct. Though the warren of streets made seeing the road’s surface itself impossible, they could make out the arms of cranes and occasional buckets of diggers.
    “They’re building a barricade,” Chester stated. “Or reinforcing the riot barriers they put up during the curfew. It’s running parallel to the river.” His eyes tracked along the wide gap marking the Thames, where the skyline was absent of any buildings. “I think it goes as far as Westminster.”
    “Of course it does. Why else build it? They had no intention of leaving the capital. They stayed. Some of them.” McInery sat down on the roof, her back to the river. “Yes. It makes sense. Hold onto Parliament, Whitehall, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, and all the surveillance equipment therein. Why establish a new seat of government elsewhere when you can keep this one and supply it by river. Cunning.”
    Chester moved closer to the roof’s edge.
    “I don’t think they’re coming out,” he said.
    “Why would they? They have the river for supplies and the enclaves to provide for them. They don’t need the scraps left by a hungry populace. We should get a feel for how far it extends.”
    “Why?” Chester asked, again thinking of where he might go and whether anywhere would be far enough.
    “Because,” she said, “we’re stuck here. As you said, we’ll have to gather all that food we distributed. But we’ll need more than that. We have to go back to the farm. Yes. We’ll do that, and we’ll tell them the government has stayed behind. For whatever reason, those people didn’t trust them enough to go on the evacuation. That might be enough. We need to find more people. Enough that we can… that we can…” she trailed off. Chester was surprised. It wasn’t like McInery to be unsure of her next dozen moves.
    “We go back to the farm,” he said. “We tell them about the warehouse and all those people in there, and how they were all dead. Tell them about the vaccine. Tell them the government did it. That should be enough to convince anyone.” Maybe someone who ran a city farm would know of somewhere rural and remote. But what were the chances, he wondered, that anywhere was remote enough to be out of the government’s reach.
     
    “You say they were all dead?” Hana asked. “Describe how they looked.”
    “I didn’t go in,” McInery lied. “Chester wouldn’t let me.”
    The small group gathered in the