Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland by Frank Tayell

windows were still closed and secure. The house was neither infested with the undead nor had it been looted, though rodents and insects had been there long before us. Anything edible and not impervious to small teeth had been devoured, right down to the labels on the tins in the cupboards.
    “The glue,” Kim said as she placed the last of three unidentifiable tins into her bag “They eat it. The paper they shred for their nests.”
     
    We found the mp3 players upstairs in a pair of bedrooms that had once belonged to two teenagers. The portable speakers took longer, and we were about to give up and try a different house when I found two sets hidden, perhaps as a sanction during some inter-sibling war, in the back of one of the living room cupboards.
    We tested the players by me taking them into a cupboard in what we reckoned was the centre of the house. Whilst Kim barricaded the outside with cushions, ready to hammer loudly the moment she judged the sound too much, I turned them on. They worked.
    “If we had time,” I said when I came out, “I'd prefer better equipment.”
    “Or a different selection of music?” she asked. “But we don't have time.”
     
    We left the house and parted ways. Kim went back towards the village to get in place to do the actual rescuing of the baby. I headed west, back the way we'd come, to create the diversion.
    I needed somewhere close enough that the sound would carry to the village, but somewhere far enough away that They wouldn't be able to hear the baby if it cried whilst they were making their escape.
    I found a low slung shed, about a mile from the village, that was once used either by pigs or cattle, or perhaps even turkeys from all I could tell from the scattering of small bones about the floor. I created a ramp out of some old planking and crates and climbed up to the roof.
    Decades of rust had eaten away the bolts holding two of the sheets of corrugated steel together. I levered them apart, taped the mp3 player to the side of the speakers and jammed them into the gap. Then I climbed down and headed east towards the town.
     
    It was pleasant being on my own again. Not nice, not good, way short of great, just pleasant. It was the solace of solitude. As I walked through the fields, I had that feeling of being alone in a vast world. I can see how it turned Cannock and Sanders mad, but not me. I felt alone, but not lonely, not the last man on Earth, because whilst it was pleasant to be out there on my own, it wasn't anything more than that. Company, stilted and awkward as it was with Kim, was far better than what I've known these last few months. No, I was relishing the brief pleasure of temporary isolation in the knowledge that companionship was only a short breadth of time away.
     
    About five hundred metres to the north and west of the village is a field in which there is some kind of weather monitoring gear. I think the miniature windmill thing is for calculating wind speed, and the enlarged test tube, possibly measures rain fall, or it might be humidity. I’m not sure.
    During most school holidays, except the one I spent at Longshanks Manor, I stayed with Jen Masterton at her family pile up in Northumberland. We had the run of hundreds of acres, getting underfoot of dozens of tenant farmers desperately trying to provide for their families.
    When, a few decades later, we were looking for a portfolio for her to specialise in, it seemed only natural to pick agriculture. It was when we were trying to put together a press release that we discovered that spending our childhood covered head to foot in dirt, was not the same as understanding anything about the crops grown in it. We stumped for nuclear power instead.
    So that array could have been part of some RFID system to track the movement of a herd, or for monitoring the frequency of crop-circles, or counting the number of bees per field or any of a million other things. I’m going to assume it had something to do with the