Surviving The Evacuation (Book 8): Anglesey by Frank Tayell Read Free Book Online Page B

clubhouse, her pensive expression matched by the fingers drumming against her rifle stock. Gwen had already gone inside. George and I followed.
    Tables and chairs lay strewn about the floor, suggesting they had, until very recently, been forming a barricade. From the dead zombie I had to step over, it hadn’t held. At the rear of the entrance lobby, an upturned desk blocked a doorway. In a room to the left, Gwen knelt by a man whose shirt was covered in blood. Hovering close by was a woman with short-cropped, green-dyed hair, and anxiety written across her face.
    “What happened, Lilith?” George asked.
    “Will got bit,” Lilith said simply. “The radio stopped working. I got some of them, but I couldn’t get a clear line of fire on the door. I was going to risk it. I was . I was going to try to shoot our way out, then you came.”
    “Where’s everyone else?” George asked.
    “They went to Caernarfon Castle, and never came back,” she said.
    I could see there were a dozen questions George wanted to ask, and I could think of just as many myself, but he left them unsaid and went over to the injured man.
    “Will? Can you hear me, Will?” he asked.
    “He can’t,” Gwen said. “He’s unconscious.”
    “He is immune,” Lilith said. “I know he is.”
    “Then we’ve only got blood loss and infection to worry about,” George said. “Gwen, Lilith, can you carry him back to the launch? We’ll go back to Anglesey. Bill, I’m going to leave Simon to watch the dock. Take Lorraine and your brother, go as far as the castle. See if the others are there. You’ve got the yacht if you need to escape. If they’re trapped, don’t do anything heroic, just get back to the yacht and wait offshore for us to return. If Miguel’s not left, maybe I can get him to delay his departure, or we’ll come back with Kim, if no one else.”
    “Check the castle, don’t do anything stupid,” I echoed.
    “Stupid, I don’t mind,” George said. “Just don’t get yourselves surrounded. We’ve not got the people to launch a second rescue.”
     
    After they’d gone, I stood in the car park, looking at the trees. It was better than looking at the bodies of the undead. Their clothes were rags, their skin taut, withered, and covered in dirt and worse. That the gunshots had destroyed their faces did little to mask the lack of humanity in their twisted frames.
    “We’re going to the castle?” Sholto confirmed. “Which way?”
    I gestured north. “It’s about a kilometre, on the other side of a river.”
    “How much of that journal was true?” Lorraine asked.
    “All of it,” I said. “Though it wasn’t necessarily the complete truth.”
    “I meant, how much of that stuff about fighting the zombies was exaggerated? How good are you?”
    “Good enough,” I said, slinging the axe over my shoulder. I limped towards the road. “What about you? What’s your story?”
    “If I tell you, will it go in the journal?” she asked.
    “Sure.”
    “Then I’ll keep it to myself,” she said.
    “Markus and his lot were the muscle on this trip?” Sholto asked.
    “You don’t need many muscles to pull a trigger,” she said. “They were meant to help with fetching and carrying. Lilith’s the fighter. I’ve never seen her so discomposed. It’s what happened to Will, of course.”
    “They survived the outbreak together?” I asked.
    “And a lot more,” she said, “but if you want to know, you’ll have to ask her.”
    I was starting to see the drawback in being known as the island’s chronicler.
    “Markus,” Sholto prompted. “What can you tell us about him?”
    “The way old George summarised the survivors doesn’t give the full picture,” she said. “He’s got this top-down approach, a way of looking back on the present from some distant future when he’ll be long dead. That’s useful, and maybe it’s because of his age, but it misses out a key demographic: the people who actually want to go out into the