Read Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest for Free Online

remember how hungry you were before the evacuation and after. They’ll have broken in, or stormed the place en masse, taking anything that was left.”
    “And licked the walls clean for good measure,” Chester added.
    “But it’s right there. Surely it’s worth looking,” Jay said.
    “Sugar might make life sweeter, but you can’t live on it,” Nilda said. “We have to keep focused. The Geiger counter first, and then the farms in Kent. How do we get into the airport?”
    “It’s a single runway, built out onto water that forms a sort of marina,” Chester said. “Not like the ones near the Tower, there were too many security concerns to let boats come and go as they liked. Access to the marina was through a lock that we’ll get to in about five minutes, and I’m pretty sure that it was open when we passed it on our way down from Hull.”
    It was. Chester had to turn the engine on to pilot the small boat through the narrow channel that led to the airport. When he switched it off, there was a brief moment of quiet, suddenly interrupted by a banging clatter from above as the undead clawed at the high-sided metal barriers of the road bridge under which they passed. Nilda scanned the quay to either side, but there were no other zombies in sight. Nevertheless, as they puttered away from the lock and bridge, and the sound slowly faded, she thought it an inauspicious start to their quest.
    “And that’s the airport,” Chester whispered though the comment was unnecessary. They could all see the planes, dozens parked, others crashed with wings jutting straight up, almost like plaintive hands reaching to the sky, but their collective attention was on a tail wing sticking out of the water at the runway’s end.
    “That’s a 747,” Tuck signed.
    “It was a short runway,” Chester said. “They’d fly to Europe and not much further. I suppose that plane was out of fuel and had nowhere else to go. The terminal’s over there.” He pointed down the long stretch of water at the cluster of large warehouse-like buildings at the far western end of the cluttered runway.
    “How close can you get the boat?” Nilda asked.
    “You want to risk turning the engines on?”
    “Look at how many planes there are. Fifty? A hundred? If they all came in carrying the undead, and if those zombies are still there, I’d rather know before we climb up.”
    Chester turned the engine on and steered a course parallel to the runway. When he pulled the boat up against a steep set of stairs next to a series of pontoons floating lazily in the water, no undead had appeared.
    “You know what a Geiger counter looks like?” Jay asked Chester as Tuck tied the boat to one of the pontoons.
    “Yep,” Chester said.
    “Good,” Jay said. “Then Tuck and I’ll sort out the rafts. You go and find one.”
    “I think one of us should stay on the boat,” Nilda said with unsubtle subtext.
    “There’s no room for passengers now, Mum.”
    “You wouldn’t be a passenger,” she said. “You’d be making sure we had a safe way out.”
    “Nowhere’s safe, not until we make it that way,” Jay replied. “And two teams are quicker than one, and quicker is safer.”
    “Then you should come with me,” Nilda insisted.
    “Chester, do you know sign language?” Jay asked.
    “You know that I don’t,” he said.
    “Then it’s settled. Tuck and I are a team. We’ve done this before. We’ll be fine.”
    Nilda was again reminded how much her son had changed, but as much as she hated it, she knew he was right.
    “Fine. Chester and I will go and find the Geiger counter. You get the rafts. We’ll be back here in… I don’t know. An hour?”
    “Right. And you’ll signal if you get into trouble?” Jay asked.
    “If we get into trouble,” Chester said, patting his pocket, “you’ll hear the shots.”
    Wanting to skip forward to the point where she and her son were once more on the relative safety of the boat, Nilda climbed up onto the runway. She