After we buried the woman, Sam and I stood over the fresh grave silently for a moment. We bowed our heads. I thought about the friends I had lost in the apocalypse and I hoped I didn’t lose any more. I wasn’t religious in any way but I said a silent prayer that I would find Lucy and she would be alive and well.
Sam raised his head and looked at me. There were tears in his eyes. He had been thinking about his own loved ones. “Let’s go back inside, man. We’ve done all we can for this woman.”
I nodded and as we walked to the house I wondered if these three people now numbered among my friends. I barely knew them but they seemed like decent people. They had let me join them and we had fought together. I didn’t know how long they would let me stay with them… they seemed to have some mission to carry out… and I didn’t know what I would do when we parted ways but for now I was glad to be with them.
As we reached the door, Sam turned to me with a serious look on his face. “There’s something we need to do now, Alex. It’s very important.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
A grin spread across his face. “We need to find beer.”
Later, Jax and I sat in the living room while Tanya and Sam fussed about in the kitchen cooking a meal. They had a friendly, joking banter between them and I wondered if they were a couple, or should be a couple. Outside, it was getting dark. We had opened all the windows in the house and left them open all afternoon to let fresh air into the house. The rotting smell was gone and now the house was filled with the fragrance of chicken being fried in herbs and spices. In his search for beer, Sam had found a freezer packed with meat.
He had also eventually found a case of beer in the pantry. A dozen bottles of Spitfire ale. A half-drained bottle sat in front of me on the coffee table as I waited for the meal. The smell of the chicken was driving me crazy.
Jax had lit a fire in the stone fireplace. The logs crackled and popped. With the ceiling light dimmed, the fire flickered orange on the walls, making the room seem cozy. Jax had unfolded her map and laid it on the rug in front of the fireplace. It showed the surrounding area and Swansea to the west. She had placed a second map next to it. That was a map of Britain, showing the contours of the coast.
I had asked her earlier about the “media lies” she had mentioned in the forest and she said they would explain everything to me after we ate. I couldn’t argue with that; right now, food was my main priority.
Sam stuck his head through the door. “Come and get it.”
We gathered in the dining room around a large oak table. Sam and Tanya had set out plates and cutlery and in the middle of the table sat two big serving bowls. One was full of boiled white rice. The other contained a mouth-watering chicken curry. Four bottles of Spitfire sat next to the rice.
I sat and said, “That looks and smells great.”
Sam laughed and said, “Tanya’s curries are great but she makes them spicy, man. If you’re not used to them, they go right through you.” He looked at Tanya and said, “We’ll probably be fighting zombies tomorrow and Alex will have to excuse himself to go shit behind a tree.”
She slapped him on the shoulder playfully. “I’m not taking the blame for that. You had just as much a hand in making it as I did. You’re the one who was heavy-handed with the spices.”
“I had to do something to cover up the way you fried the chicken with too much coriander,” he said, looking at me and winking, letting me in on his joke.
“You liar!” Tanya said.
“Well it smells great,” I said. We set about loading the curry and rice onto our plates and grabbing a bottle of beer each.
“Who’s going to do the toast?” Jax asked.
“I’ll do it,” Sam said. He raised his bottle and said, “The fallen and the lost.”
We all repeated it and started eating. The curry tasted amazing, despite Sam’s jokes.
“How about a little radio?” Sam asked through a mouthful of food. He went out of the room and I heard him digging about in his backpack. He came back in with a small digital radio and placed it in the middle of the table. He switched it on and the familiar, smooth voice of DJ Johnny Drake filled the room.
“…to all the survivors out there alone. This one is for you from Matt in Survivors Camp Delta. This is The Doors and ‘Riders on the Storm’.” The music started and we listened to it as we ate. Sam sang along here and there but mainly we just let it work its magic on us. In this post-apocalyptic world, music had gained an added importance beyond its ability to lift our moods; it was a relic of the old world.
Unlike other relics such as cars and fast food restaurants and coffee shops, music seemed alive. It spoke to a deep place inside us. It was the same with books. I had read a selection of books on The Big Easy and my mind craved more. Even though the books on the boat were thriller novels that I might not have read before the apocalypse—I usually stuck to sci fi and horror—they nourished my soul by giving me a connection with the past that other inanimate objects could not.
As soon as the radio had been turned on, the mood in the dining room went up. I felt easy, relaxed. The beer helped but mainly it was Jim Morrison singing about life, and the mellow keyboards. When The Doors finished, the Eurythmics song “Here Comes the Rain Again” started. Over the opening bars, Johnny Drake said, “This is a request for Lisa in Survivors Camp Gamma.”
“They’re naming the camps now,” Jax said.
Tanya nodded.
As we finished the meal, I wondered how many times the farmer and his family had sat around this table enjoying dinner together. They could not have guessed that one day the world would be changed forever, they would all be dead, and a group of strangers would be sitting at the table listening to music and eating curry. For that family, it was all over.
Maybe they were the lucky ones.
We pushed the empty plates away and took our beers into the living room where the fire still crackled in the fireplace. Sam brought the radio in and placed it on the mantelpiece. Rhiannon was singing about an umbrella.
“Come and look at this map,” Tanya said, pointing to the map of Britain. I sat on the rug next to her.
“Is it possible to take a boat from here”—she indicated the coast near our current location— “to here?” She pointed farther south at the city of Truro in Cornwall.
I had been to Cornwall on holiday when I was ten years old. My parents had taken Joe and me to Truro to look at the port. There had been some big ships there. “Yes, it’s possible to take a boat there,” I said, “but why Truro? It’s no different from any other city.”
“It is different,” Tanya replied, “because that’s where the radio station is being broadcast from.” She looked at me closely but I didn’t get her point.
I looked at Jax and Sam sitting on the sofa. “I don’t understand.”
Jax leaned forwards and told me their plan.
“We’re going to take over Survivor Radio.”
twelve
“I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why?”
“We’re only going to take it over temporarily,” Tanya said. “We need to get a message out to anyone who’s listening.”
“What message?”
“The people in the Survivors Camps need to leave. The people outside of the camps need to stay there and not report to the military checkpoints.”
I looked from one to the other of my new friends. The firelight flickered on their solemn faces. They were serious. They were actually considering taking over Survivor Radio. I could only imagine how well the army must be guarding their one media channel. How did Tanya, Jax, and Sam think they were going to get into the studio? Just walk in under the noses of the soldiers?