Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest by Frank Tayell Read Free Book Online Page A

outside and took the rafts over to the boat.
    “That’s four, how many more do we need?” Jay asked.
    “As many as we can get,” Tuck signed.
    “We could look for fuel instead,” he suggested.
    She smiled, recognising his attempt to soothe her sombre mood.
    “Where?” she signed. “I can’t see any storage tanks. They’ll be far away from the runway, probably on the other side of the terminal. If they were above ground, then like you said, the contents will have evaporated. But if they hadn’t, or if it was stored below ground and we found it, so what? We don’t have any way of transporting it.”
    “Yeah, but that’s not really a problem,” Jay said. “Not compared to the other stuff we’ve done.”
    “Maybe not, but collecting it would take time. We’d have to go back to the Tower, then back here, and back again. We’d lose three days, maybe a week, and at the end of it, what would we have? Like Chester said, we’ve enough fuel to get the boat down to Kent, and enough for a car to drive to Wales. What do we need more for?”
    “Yeah, I suppose.”
    Jay looked as disappointed as she felt. There was something depressing about being surrounded by planes that would never fly again. Nor would people, she thought. Even with fuel and a pilot, they would never take off because there was nowhere left to land. She looked down at the rafts. They would help, of course, but the very point of them was that they didn’t require fuel. They represented another step away from civilisation. One day they would rip or tear, and then they’d have to try and make new boats out of wood. She wondered how far back they would have to go before they started moving forward, and how many generations it would take after that before people returned to the air.
    “Let’s try that plane over there,” she signed. “Maybe we’ll find some peanuts.” The prospect appeared to cheer him up no more than it did her.
     
    Terminal
    Despite telling herself not to, Nilda couldn’t resist looking back at her son walking towards one of the planes, his hands moving in animated conversation with the soldier. She told herself to focus and turned her attention to the looming cluster of buildings ahead.
    “A Geiger counter,” she said. “Would those be kept with customs or with the maintenance crews?”
    “I’d say with the police and security people,” Chester said. “But we might be able to avoid going into the main terminal. The fire engines that they sent to major incidents all had radiological detection equipment on board, and if a plane crash isn’t a major incident, I don’t know what is.”
    “A fire engine? How do you know that?”
    He just threw her a sideways look.
    “Seriously?” she asked. “You stole fire engines?”
    “Only the one. And it wasn’t me who actually drove it off. I reckon they’d be kept in one of those warehouses. The doors are about the right height.”
    They’d reached the point where the long ribbon of runway joined the far wider land on which the terminal and other buildings had been constructed. The nearest one had a pair of retractable gates. Both were closed, but next to the nearest was a door. Chester tried the handle.
    “It’s locked,” he said. He pulled out a long hunting knife and was about to lever at the lock when Nilda put a warning hand on his arm and a cautioning finger to her lips.
    “Listen,” she mouthed. It was soft, almost inaudible, but a dry, almost rhythmic rustling came from inside.
    “Zombies?” Chester mouthed.
    Nilda gave an uncertain shrug and moved over to the wide retractable gate. Cautiously, she leaned forward, pressing her ear against the cool metal. There was an explosion of sound. She jumped back, drawing her sword in one fluid movement, but the sound hadn’t come from inside the building. An irregular green streak poured out of a crashed jet. Out of all the possible explanations her brain started with the worst, cycling from smoke to chlorine gas